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Hello, welcome back to the VEX Classroom. My name is Aimee, and in this STEM lab, we are going to walk through the Clawbot with Controller IQ STEM Lab. In this STEM lab, the students are learning how to program with loops and how to use event-based programming to code the controller to trigger the robot to perform certain actions. They'll be coding the joysticks and the buttons on the controller to make the robot perform certain things and then use that to compete in a series of fun mini challenges.

Now, this is an intermediate STEM lab unit. It's not a beginner lab, so you don't want to make this the student's first coding experience. Go ahead and have them do some other coding labs first before they take this one on. In addition, you want to make sure that the firmware is updated on your brain and on your controller, that your batteries are charged on both of those as well, and that VEXcode IQ has been downloaded to all your students' devices ahead of time. If you need help with any of that, I'm going to put a link to our get started page down below this video that will help answer any questions you may have about that process.

All right, let's dive in and take a look at this lab. During this video, I'm going to be walking you through the teacher-facing version of this STEM lab. We are going to take a look right now at the pacing guide. The pacing guide is a great place to start with your lab because it helps you decide how you want to implement it. We know that teachers have a variety of different challenges with time and with space in order to implement these STEM labs, so we've given you several options.

If you have a very short amount of time, you might only complete the play section. That would be if you had a pre-built clawbot on hand and ready to go, which would be suitable for a really short 45-minute class period. But if you have a little bit more time, you could just do the seek and play sections. That's going to give you some building and coding experiences for your students, but it will still cut down on the amount of time. Alternatively, you could possibly implement the full 170 minutes and go through all the sections of the lab.

Also, you can always skip the apply section and do it later. The apply section of the lab is the part of the lab where we encourage students to make a real-world connection and also give them some competition robotics connections. It's a reading assignment and can be assigned for homework or done at another time. All of our first-generation IQ STEM labs follow the SPARK format, which stands for seek, play, apply, rethink, and know.

So, we're going to go to the seek section now. The seek section is the building section of the lab. In this section, we walk students through step-by-step building the clawbot. I do want to point out to you that we have a little bit of advice here for assigning roles to your students when they're building the clawbot in a group. That way, everyone has a job to do, and they're all engaged during the building process.

All right, let's dive into the play section. In the play section, students begin to learn how to code the controller using loops and get some experience also driving with the controller. They're going to use forever blocks and see how those work in a program as well. By the end, they will be competing or participating in the robo slalom challenge. This is a fun challenge where students are going to use classroom objects and set up a little slalom course, then use the controller to navigate through it. You could, if you wanted, make this into a classroom competition.

Another thing is that if your students are having a little trouble understanding the power and the use of the forever block in their programs, you can have them remove it from the program and see what happens. That would be a really powerful way for them to see how necessary it is to keep it in there.

Thank you for joining us in this STEM lab walkthrough. We hope you and your students enjoy the Clawbot with Controller IQ STEM Lab. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out. Happy coding!

So the controller can move the clawbot indefinitely. All right, we already talked about the apply section, which is optional, so let's move on to rethink.

In the rethink section, students are gonna begin to participate in these mini challenges. They will be starting with an example project for each one, which is the clawbot control example project, and then remixing them to make them their own. I recommend that they first predict what they think the example project is going to do, then purposefully plan out what they want their project to do in the challenge, and then remix their code. Each one of these little challenges gives students a little bit of coding experience and some driving experience.

One thing I wanted to point out to you is that especially the last two remix challenges, which are challenges B and C, do require a bit of classroom setup. You're gonna want to take a look at these teacher toolboxes that are in front of each one of these three mini challenges because they will help you decide how you wanna set up your room and how to get prepped ahead of time. It's not major prep, but you do need to think about it ahead of time. Another thing is, you might wanna go ahead and have them do each one of these challenges on a different day. They don't all need to be completed in the same day, so that might be another option for you.

All right, once they've completed these mini challenges where they've coded their controller to navigate their robot through these series of fun activities, you can move on to the know section. In the know section, this is our assessment section. There are review questions here, which you can use for a self-assessment or classroom assessment.

All right, so you're probably wondering once you finish this Clawbot with Controller lab, where are you going to go next? Well, let's take a look at our cumulative pacing guide here. Like I said, the Clawbot with Controller is at the end of the series here, so it's a more intermediate coding lab, but your students may need more practice with coding. You could go back and have them do "to do or not to do" or "loop there it is." Or you might choose to go back and do a more engineering-focused lab like M.A.D. Box. But you could also move into VEXcode VR, which would be a really fun way to continue the student's coding journey.

I hope you've enjoyed this STEM lab walk-through video and that it has helped you answer some questions and prepared you to implement this lab in your classroom. If you have any questions or any comments, feel free to post them in our PLC, and we'll be sure to answer them. I look forward to seeing you again in another video.

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