VEX Robotics Educators Conference.

I'm really excited to talk about this today because we've done something very unique where I come from. In order for you to really grasp how much we've done, I want to give you a little bit of an idea of where I'm coming from.

I was a 25-year teacher in Woodland Hills School District. We never had a STEM program, and we adopted VEX Robotics. But one of the most important things is we are right outside of Pittsburgh. So we are pretty much an urban school district.

We're not an affluent, high-achieving school district. We don't have super high test scores. A lot of our kindergartners come in at the beginning of the year, and they've had no prior school experience. So we're literally starting from the very beginning with those kids. And I think that's important for you to understand when you see how much we are doing in our district, especially with our kindergartners. You'll get to see some of the evidence of what they actually are doing in the classroom. So you can see where we are represented with 12 boroughs. Seventy-five percent of are students of color and more than 80 percent have free and reduced lunches. So it gives you an idea where we're coming from. So a history of our district is we started off in 1981 with a court order for racial inequities in the area. And they took these five school districts and merged them. And it was a very hotly debated issue at the time. So it's been a while. It's been a while. We've gotten through all that. We now have a K-12 STEAM program. We offer 17 AP courses and we have a lot of extracurricular activities. So it's a really a great place to be now. But a few years ago, we had a superintendent that changed the name of all of our schools and put STEAM on the side.

When our superintendent switched over, the new one came in and said, Hey, where's your STEM program? And we as teachers were like, what are you talking about? We don't have one. Why is the name at the school on the top of the school? Right. So at that point, they decided that they needed to adopt a STEAM program. And that's when VEX Robotics was brought into our district. Now, in our district, K-6 teachers teach it every single day, 40 minutes a day. It is a block that they have. The classroom teacher teaches it 40 minutes a day. And then it becomes an elective 7 through 12. So that was something that was unique that a lot of people don't do. A lot of people have a STEM teacher that has the rotation and they do VEX as part of it or robotics as part of it. So the very next year in 23, 24, that's when I took on this role and I wanted to start doing engineering notebooks in the classroom. One of the things the teachers often complained about was we're doing VEX 40 minutes a day. I have to teach math. I have to teach reading. My kids don't know their letters. They don't know their numbers. And writing was always a struggle to fit in anyway. So if we just make this cross-curricular and we can put the writing into the STEM, then we're getting both ends, right?

So starting off, what's an engineering notebook? So we're going to start talking about just what that actually means. When we first started, it was just if you guys do the STEM labs at all, the very final day five is always just a journaling day. So we started just journaling. That's how we began. And then we moved into more structured engineering notebooks. We really just wanted it to make a place for the kids to document that they were doing from start to finish, but particularly focusing on making reflections, doing problem solving, doing some brainstorming. And what I love most about it, it wasn't just a place where they were just writing steps for what they were doing in facts, but it was giving them a place to explain decisions and explain the thinking that they were having.

So why do we use it in K to 12? I spoke to a lot of parents because in evolving through this, we also have robotics competition teams now. And I spoke to parents that had said to me how much they truly appreciate what we were teaching the kids in the classroom and with the engineering notebook at the competition teams, because they were working within some big, big companies and they were in charge of a team. And within that team, the people that worked for them couldn't problem solve, didn't know how to brainstorm. Their communication was poor. And they really appreciated what we were trying to do in school to teach those soft skills that we all need in the real world. I think we sometimes as teachers just assume that kids know how to do these things. And I think even a lot of us as adults aren't real great at that stuff. So it's something that we have to teach them. And this was one way we would be able to do it. So these are like the real world skills that they were telling me that a lot of the employees they had were lacking.

So the engineering design process, obviously, is what our notebooks are going to follow through. We wanted to stress that it's a creative process. It's iterative. There's not one right answer. That's one of my favorite parts. And we didn't want to see the kids getting stuck using a formula or step by step copying things. We wanted it to be more of a, you know, their reflection and their thinking.

So they make students thinking visible. And here's a picture of one of my upper elementary notebooks. We try and stress sketches and diagrams. And we always tell the kids, we're not grading your artwork. We try to teach them the scientific design, like the scientific drawing where they want to label left to right, not diagonally. So you can see all of the try to get them right, all of their words left to right as best as they can. But that's just the simple VEXcode robot.

And that was their that was their sketch and their labeling.

Data collection is really important. They will do a lot of charts. You will see those come up, too. OK, so here's an example of a chart. So communication and literacy skills is another thing that we work on. Critical thinking and writing. So they organize their ideas. This was one where they had to detect the color of an object. They use the VEXcode robot and the eye sensor to detect colors, and they put it into a chart. The hue values, the actual than if it was light or dark in the room.

And then this, again, allows STEM to bleed into other subject areas. So, again, we're trying to make it cross curricular to help in all different ways.

Reflection, metacognition. So they write about what worked, what didn't work, what would they change? Now, one of the other things, of course, we want to do where we are. We have the kids working in groups of three or four with the VEX kits. So promoting the collaboration and accountability. I pulled this from one of our actual elementary team competition team notebooks. And the main reason why I pulled this and not one from the classroom was because I wanted to point out to you, if you look at it, it says, we are building drivetrain three. We tried to twist the shafts. We thought about disassembling the last idea we had in the end. We twist it. So I think it's important to show you there are no eyes on this page. They aren't working individually. They're collaborating and they're showing the accountability by using that. We we did this as a team. We're not doing this by ourselves.

And then, of course, real world career skills. When we get into looking at some of the higher level ones that are in the high school level, you'll see it. We want it to mirror what they're going to be doing in college or some of the technical fields that they'll be going into.

So here's what the engineering notebooks look like, how we do it. When I first started, I we had six grade teachers that were doing an amazing job, and I would go in their classroom and they would spend 30 minutes going through, how do you open up your notebook? How do you draw a table of contents? Where do you write the date? And to me, that seemed crazy to be doing at a sixth grade level. So I said, OK, we're going to take this sixth grade level and I'm going to find teachers. I created a team of teachers and we worked backwards. This is the end product in sixth grade. What can you do in fifth grade? What can you do in fourth grade? And we went all the way back to kindergarten. So that's how we established sort of the template or the program that what we wanted it to look like per grade level.

The next large number of slides, I'm going to focus on kindergarten because a lot of people can't really grasp the concept of how can you do an engineering notebook in kindergarten? It doesn't have to be as complicated as you would think it would be in a high school level. OK, so I created these myself. We started with like lined paper notebooks. Teachers were like, this is just not going to work. So I created the notebooks myself. I have some here if anybody wants to see them as well. But just a simple box with the lines for kindergarten.

And what they do is at the beginning of the year, they're very simple. They're just learning how to write. Again, they don't all know their letters. So they seem a little daunting, you know, for a five or six year old. So you have to keep it simple. But they focus more on the pictures. And the drawings than the words in the beginning. And then that will come later. So here's some of what we got. This is like the first week. They're literally just drawing their 123 robot. And this one was tell me one of the rules. Be gentle to little stick figures.

OK, so again, and the teacher, she wrote it, they traced it. So you've got to, you know, level it, differentiate it for what you have in your classroom. Here's another one. And I know in the past, I've shown this to people, they're like, that's not an engineering notebook. But the teacher, one of the VEX 123 STEM labs is about the dragon and the villagers. And I think the villagers have to collect materials so that the dragon doesn't, you know, come wreck the village, whatever it is. The teacher did a character setting problem, you know, plot solution. And then the kids wrote about what they did. So now it's a more detailed drawing. Here's my 123 board, my robot, my houses, the castle. And they wrote it was easy. VEX went to the houses to get materials. So that sounds kind of simple, which it should be. But there is a reflection. It was easy. So we're starting to push them into thinking about why or what they've done.

I have a video on this one. So you can see where this comes from.

Go ahead.

No, it's go to bed. All right. So the student read the sentence. They coded their 123 robot to the picture of the elephant piggy book that matched.

And then this is what they wrote. So they drew their picture and they wrote, we had to code to the pigeon. Books. It was easy to code to the pigeon books. OK, so this is a little further along, probably about mid year. What we're seeing.

This is the journal we did this. So this is teacher modeling.

OK, our journal this week, our notebook this week is going to be very, very different. Last week, we drew the board. We drew a detailed robot.

Right. All of that last week. This week, it's going to be different.

Because I want the tunnel. That is what we did in VEX this week. We made the tunnel. Now, I made a tunnel out of what did I use?

Magnets.

Are you going to say magnets? No, no. Did you guys make a tunnel out of magnets? No, no one did. No one did. So let's do it. Are you now boys and girls? When you do yours, I'm going to hide my word magnets.

Because you can't write magnets. You have to write what you made your own tunnel out of. Right. You have to write your own word. Legos or blocks or big blocks or heights or whatever you used. OK. OK. All right. You ready? Yeah. Here we go. Let's get our journals. Coughing, cold, flu season. If you couldn't tell in kindergarten. I think the most important thing why I want to show this is it's supporting the kindergarten writing skills. But most importantly, it's modeling, modeling, modeling, even truly all the way up through the high school level. Really have to model it. And you really have to commit to doing it as at the K to two level, they do it once a week at the end of their STEM lab. They'll do a writing activity. Once we hit third grade, we're doing it every day. So you really have to commit to that. And sometimes it's just especially at that level, if the kids are just working on a code and they're just spending their whole time iterating and testing and rerunning a code, then it might just be a very simple entry. And they don't have to be super lengthy as they get older either. Here's another one. This is one of the ones where they made the tunnel.

And then we move into first grade. So in first grade, we start a table of contents already created for them. They just have to fill it in. Page numbers are given to them.

Okay. So they start off at the beginning of the year. You know, remember from kindergarten, we're now building. They start with the basic. They don't do reflections till the middle of the year. Here we want to pick up with starting with the reflections. So the page number, the picture, reflections, word or sentence. Moving, we do four, nine weeks where we are. So by the third nine weeks, we want them to have a title at the top of their page. And then by the fourth nine weeks, we want to start with some pictures, some diagrams and filling in the table of contents.

So there's an example of. This classroom wrote their own cheer. It's called the VEX cheer. You can see it there. And then this one was just simple introduction of the robot, the my robot entry.

And I think they named their robot.

So still not a ton of detail. Here's some more first grade. And it's starting to build in first grade. In kindergarten, we do only touch in first grade. They do touch and move into the coding cards. So a lot of times when they get to this point, the teachers start with reflections of what do you like better? Touch or coders? Why do you like it better? So you see that in a lot of their entries.

I can code it to turn right. I can get it to turn left. It was easier to use the coding cards because the coding cards are easy to find.

Second grade. So second grade, we try and specifically look more at the scientific drawing. They now have a table of contents. You see it gets a little smaller and same type of writing page, but more lines.

And then here's what we've got in second grade. So we're obviously building on what we did in kindergarten in first grade. But now they add a goal. And they add steps. So now we're asking them to take a deeper dive into what they're learning. Most of the time, the goals teacher provided. Sometimes it's a class discussion. What's the goal today? So we can write it together. And then you can see here, this is when they start using VEXcode 123, at least where we are. That's how we separate K1 and 2. So they draw a picture of their coder here. And then now they have different options on how to do their steps. So some of these are the printables that you get right off of VEX's website, where they can just color in the direction they're going and draw their board. And the teachers just have them cut it out, glue it in their notebook.

That one's hard to see. What's their goal? Their goal was... I don't even know if I can read it. Oh, find and fix a bug in the project. And then they had a process and a reflection. I have a hard time debugging for whatever reason. It's a little hard to read. But that's what that one was.

We started using VEX AIM this year. So this one is a second grade classroom that was using VEX AIM. They had to make a prediction on one of the pages. And then this one was a little bit more detailed with driving with a controller.

So you can see that they're really starting to develop and write a lot more.

That one's the steps for robot dance. I don't know if you guys know that, but just a short video. If you don't know robot dance, this is what it is. I'm going, mom. This will be so fun.

30 second dance party!

That was so nice.

So you can see they used the... That was the template also from VEX's website. They cut out, glued in, filled it out. So that makes it nice and easy to be able to use those printables as well. Then we go into third and fifth grade. And with these teachers, they really wanted graph paper. So the first year we tried all graph paper, and then the kids struggled with writing on graph paper. So I created it so that the left side of the page was lined paper, the right side of the page was graph paper. So they were able to do their writing on one side, and then their diagrams on the other.

And then again, building, we're looking at adding the iterations in and their reflection being more of a problem solution.

At this point, depending on the grade level, some of the teachers are now letting the kids write their own goals. So it's okay if you have different goals throughout the class. It doesn't always have to be that everybody has the same goal, as long as their writing follows through with what they started with their goal.

So these are some examples of third, fourth, and fifth grade. So that's the Mars buggy that they did. You can see here brainstorming ideas. So they have their brainstorming. They drew some of what they wanted to do.

And then the one over there talks a little bit about the changes and the iterations they wanted to make to their buggy. That's like real tiny at the top.

Okay, so here these are some of the other ones. This one is, I think it's tallest tower. I can't remember what this one is. Oh, this is astronaut rescue, if you know the VEXcode program. So here you can see this is third grade. So they update, they have a goal, design and create a mechanism to rescue Josh, the VEXcode astronaut. Materials, they have a problem. I need a mechanism to be able to be five inches taller more. That was the problem. Then they say, but they added to it to fix that. And then they have their reflection down here. The pieces I used were, they listed some things, trying to figure out how to make it. So they have a reflection. And then that was their diagram that went along with it.

This one I threw in, this was the code base with the LED bumper.

Specifically to show you an adaptation a teacher made. Because we know that we need to differentiate for our kids. But here's an adaptation that the teacher did where they had the question typed out the lines. And they just cut it out and glued it in the notebook. I think that was maybe fourth or fifth grade. And then with the code base, they have a goal, materials, steps.

Now I jump into middle school. And this is again, remember we started here and worked backwards. So this is what a typical middle school notebook looks like. They have a table of contents. They do all of their diagrams. They do VEX IQ in middle school. Okay, so date, title, goal, learn the parts and functions of the brain controller and tool. They did all the labeling.

Again, teacher made copies. They cut it out. They glued it in. So that cut back one, then doing all the drawing. Okay, and then here's some of what they did with a table down at the bottom. So date, title, goal, material, steps. Date, title, goal, material, steps. And then one of the things we try and do with them is an overhead view. The aerial view and the side view diagram. So you can see they did that when they build their robot. And then they have a reflection. What problems did you encounter? When to complete the build? How do you answer, overcome these problems? And these reflections in sixth grade, the teacher often gave them a question to actually answer. They put their code in. They just do block coding in sixth grade. So they write their code when they do it. And then here the reflection, why is coding just as important as building?

Anything to get them thinking more.

And then here's some more of their charts. They had a word bank. They were testing their gears. You can see all their gear ratio drawings.

Here's another. Somebody got a little bit more detail on their coding, block coding.

The reflection on this one. Do you think a single person making a small change can impact the world? Oh, I put this thing because I really like the teacher's response. And the students said, I don't think that one person can change the world. And respectfully, the teacher said, well, what about somebody like Martin Luther King?

So again, not necessarily specifically talking about what that actual lab was, but something that can relate to that as a reflection question.

Then we move into high school. This is very tiny and hard to see on these slides. But when they start in high school, they start with their first slide or their first entry. And it's about the contents of their notebook. What's expected?

This last one says must use pen.

Anybody that has a competition team, you know, if you do any written notebooking, they do say use pen, cross it off. I try and get the elementary kids to do the same thing. I say to the teachers, don't let them erase. Tell them to put a big X. Tell them to put a line and write it again, because STEM is all about making mistakes. We want to celebrate those mistakes. So that's one of the ways that as they get older, we do force them to use a pen. They do all their parts. They do definitions.

And then this was how to set up a controller and things like that. So this is like their basic just beginning of setting up their notebook with all their directions. And then it moves into some of their labs.

So here's one where they have the diagrams, the labeling of the diagrams, some of the problems that they had.

That's as attempt number one up there. This is some of their data. We played against this team and we got this score.

Our high school kids just use EXP. So they're just doing the STEM labs within EXP.

And then this one I put in because I wanted to show you that even they will sometimes just even snap a picture, snap a photograph on their Chromebook, print it out. And that's one they didn't want to draw. And that's OK. Same with the code. You know, just taping, taking a clip of the code, printing it out and putting it in. I think the most important thing is that you're going to have them done at all different levels. That's what we have in our classroom all the time. They don't have to all be so particularly detailed. Just getting them to think and think at a higher level is going to be your most important important thing and celebrate what they do. Nothing's wrong. That's why I really like doing these. There's nothing wrong about any of the way they've done it.

So my next couple of slides are just sort of like best practices.

And again, I say you've got to try and do it daily or if you have little ones at least once a week, try and get a schedule, try and stick to a schedule. Once you get them in a pattern or they have a template to follow, it will be a lot easier to get them to do it. And one of the things that we see with our after school competition teams is in the beginning, they used to come in and they're like, oh great, more writing. This is after school. I don't want to do this. But now that they've been doing it in the classroom, it's sort of like second nature. We don't really have to hold their hands and get them to go through it and beg them to do it every day. So my favorite part here is celebrate messy thinking. It doesn't have to be perfect. And I think that's one thing that I have found over the past couple of years in doing this is the kids want everything to be perfect. How do I get an A? I have to get every question right. That's not what this is about. Let them be messy. Let it like if it doesn't make sense, it's fine. It's not an English grade. If it's improper English, if it's spelled wrong, you just have to let those things go.

Because those are the things that will hold them back. That's why they don't want to write sometimes, because they're so worried about having to do it perfectly and making those mistakes.

So here's a sample template that we use. Your date, the name, the project challenge name, the goal, what you worked on, diagrams and labels, what problems, how do you solve them, and then what are your next steps? So when you come in tomorrow, what are you going to do next?

Once you can get them into this routine, it's really easy for them to just continue, because then all you have to say is open up your notebook. What did you say you were going to do today?

These are just a little bit of prompts that go along with it, identifying the problem, planning, creating, and your data.

Don't be afraid to give them three or four prompts. You pick one today. What do you want your reflection to be? The more ownership you give them, the more they will be engaged and be willing to do it, and the more success you will see.

So these are just some examples of some of the prompts that we've used through the grade levels. So K to two. I liked when I learned that my design work did not work because next time I want to try or draw me an emoji. How do you feel about today's STEM lab?

Keeping it simple.

Three to five. One challenge I faced, something I discovered.

We always like the one, one thing my team did well today. What went good? What went bad? A lot of times the kids will say, we didn't get along. We argued the whole time and nothing got done. That's okay.

And then here's some six to eight.

One mistake that improved my design.

Again, celebrating mistakes. I think that's important.

So it depends on the teacher. Some of them do it as groups. Some of them do it individually. If they do it as groups, they usually rotate through, you know, and each kid has a turn writing during the week or whatever it is. So I just kind of leave that on the teachers. Some teachers don't want to have all the kids writing, especially at the younger level. They will all be writing individually. But as they get older, then groups, it just, it really, I just kind of leave that up to them. That's fits. I've had teachers tell me that they really struggle doing it as a group because one kid does it, nobody else does it. But then I have other teachers that have had a lot of success where they just rotate. Monday is your day, Tuesday is your day, or a day one, day two, however, you know, your system works. That's a good question.

And then some of the high school ones. So just some teacher tips.

Modeling, obviously, frequently. We don't grade our, some of them you see in the middle school and the high school, they would put like 10 out of 10, and that's more for accountability. So that the kids are doing it, the kids know it's a grade. But for the most time, we don't really grade them. We more celebrate them. So pulling out a good entry or one that has a different type of reflection and just sharing it with the kids or having the kids share it with the class is more what we do with them. So that's my contact information. If you have any types of questions or you want to get a hold of me, my email, I'm on three different platforms of social media that I always post what we're doing. And, you know, in the district with VEX and everything that we do with our STEM program. So that QR code will take you to all of that information. Any questions? So what you showed was all classroom based. The question I have is, when these groups become teams, is the same expectation set for the engineering notebooks or do they look different from this? So let's see if I can go back a few slides. They, they look a lot like the same template. If I can find the one I had, it was third, I'm sorry.

It might be in here somewhere. It was the one that had the we and the I that I had pointed out. I don't know if I'll be able to find it. Okay. But our coach pretty much sets it up the same exact way.

Give me a second.

This one. So the team notebooks will start with their team meeting. They will have a date who's attending that day, what their goal is for the day. They move into their problem for the day. Then we require them when they brainstorm, they must come up with three to five brainstorming ideas to test. They're supposed to test every single one of those, put their data in, then put their solution in, why they chose that, any iterations they make along the way. And then I think that's pretty much it. It's like this is a brief section of this, but this was the first year we started the engineering notebooks. They pretty much follow that same kind of template. Thank you, Tina. That was really helpful. You know a lot about my situation, but I teach grades three through eight at Clairton in Pennsylvania, and they have not, I just started this year, they have not done any notebooking yet. We started with our competition team. I don't think they really do a whole lot of writing generally in the school. So I want to start this next year. I'm trying to think of my most tangible question here. I think the hardest thing is grades six through eight. I only have 43 minutes with them once a week. So I want to start this, but I'm thinking like how, any advice you have on like how to like quickly, like do I try to do a structured journals next year, or do I just start with like, okay, at the five minutes of the class, we're just going to like write for five minutes, you know.

Like what advice do you have for starting this with middle schoolers who probably aren't writing much in their regular school life? Right. So one of the things with the older kids, because they are taking usually like a whole week to do something. So a lot of the teachers will start on the first day, and they'll set up the notebook with them. Okay, we're all going to start with our, you know, the setup date, title, whatever. What is our goal? What is your problem? And then that can sometimes take you a whole 40 minutes just depending on the type of class you have. And then as you move into each day, as they're working, we just constantly remind them stop and write that down. I mean, when you hear the conversation, just to begin the process with them, you have to remind them, stop what you're doing. And I know it's hard because you want to write it down and then let them go back and then stop what you're doing. I like what you're saying, but you need to write it down. So we kind of have to bring that back. But again, the more you do that, and the more vigilant you are in reminding them, it eventually, we just saw it become a natural process where they knew, okay, wait, I've got to write this down.

So that's my best advice on that. I do have some teachers that have said they had thought about just letting them work and then giving them that last five to 10 minutes of class just to write. Really, an engineering notebook should be a continuous process. So the optimal way is to have them just continuously doing this throughout whatever they're encountering. Thank you. You're welcome. So my question is, in my situation, trying to implement this, it's going to be just for middle school students. I think I'd love to get the whole school on that. I don't think it's going to happen right away. So for me, I'm just going to be doing it with sixth, seventh and eighth graders. So I'm curious if you have experience with trying to implement, teach the whole thing to middle schoolers, like from the beginning in one school year. And if you have any recommendations for that, I guess, for example, like, do you do start the same way you would with the younger kids where at first it's just the date, the title, things like that, and then build on it? Or is there kind of a different approach? So if you're going into this and you've never done it, start simple. I mean, it's literally like going back to the very beginning ones that we talked about.

You're right. I would just start with the very simple things. And, you know, you know very well, every class is different. Every period is different. Every class group of kids you get every year is different. So you're going to find that what worked this year didn't work last year or vice versa, as with anything you do. But I always think you've got to start simple. The more you pile on them, especially when I don't know what your experience is, but none of the kids like to write, at least where I am. None of them boo. They all boo. Nobody wants to. So you make it simple. They're willing to do it if it's a short amount, like the three to five minute burst, right? And then you can build on that. But I would definitely say start from the beginning for sure. And don't try and just do everything in the first year all at once. You probably won't get it all done. It's OK. Can we do sell your engineering notebook? Like, can we buy the VEXcode notebook? Wait, what did you say? Your notebooks that you've like already created are awesome. Do you sell them? I'm going to sell them. But here's the thing. I actually let's see in these slides. Do you share the slideshows with on PD Plus or anything?

Yes. Because I will show you I actually have the links in here for the notebooks to my drive. So watch. Where does it say? OK, so these titles. There we go.

Should have a link.

Oh, OK, it came up on my computer, Tom, but it's not here. Hold on. Can I do this? So for free, these can all be posted in the VEX professional learning community. How do I do this? So she'll share her slides and then she can share the links. And like I said, Tina is super accessible in the community. So I don't know if there's a way that can I swipe it over? But the kindergarten first, second and then third through fifth, those are the ones I created. And then those titles at the top are actually links and it opens up to my drive and I put it open for anybody. So literally like this is the entire notebook.

So, like I said, K to five. I have have linked in there if they're able to do that. Thank you. You're welcome. It's the first time we've ever been asked that. Leave it to me. I think if you want to actually see a physical notebook, I do have I think I have the 123 and I think I may have brought a GO. I can't remember, but thank you so much. Let's give Tina warm round of applause.

VEX Robotics Educators Conference.