(upbeat music)

Please help me in welcoming Marco Diez. Marco is the executive director for Miami-Dade Public Schools. He's going to share with us how to develop and implement a virtual robotics event for your district. I think this is a really good opportunity for everyone to take away that they can log right on to vr.vex.com once we're finished. And I know Marco will be around for the next few days afterwards as well.

(audience applauding)

Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Dallas. This is my second year here. This is an awesome event, and I'm glad that I was invited again.

Alright, so today, everybody, I'll be talking about how in Miami-Dade we develop and we've been implementing a virtual robotics event for the entire district. We are the third largest district in the United States. But everything that I'll be mentioning today is applicable at a lower scale. So let's say you want to do something similar to this at your school site or among two or three schools close by, you could also do the same thing. You can apply the same logistics that we have been using and do it at your school site.

I do want to mention or introduce not just myself, but my team. I oversee a team in Miami-Dade called the iLearn team. We work with different technology, including VEX Robotics. We call ourselves a VEX Robotics district in Miami-Dade only because we have almost close to 400 schools, with almost 90% of them having some type of VEX Robotics platforms inside. However, we do support other robotics platforms, like Lego, Sphero, and other platforms around.

My team also handles trainings for anything relating to AI. We do a lot of training, support schools, and all of that. I do want to highlight them because a lot of the work that I do is thanks to all of them. If you scroll all the way down, you're going to see our social media links. You can follow us on Twitter or X and Instagram as well.

Alright, so real quick, I was looking at the previous QR code answers and I noticed a lot of teachers in the room. I put this together with three questions. I wanted to have an idea if you have managed or assisted your district or other schools in managing events, whether it's a VEX IQ event, a VEX Go event, a VEX V5 event, or any virtual event. If you've done something like that, I would like to see that. Once you scan the QR code, you're going to have three questions. Go ahead and answer all three of them. For the third question, I'd like you to try to come up with only one, two, or three words.

Alright, I'll give you a few more seconds. Well, it looks like a little bit more than 50% of the audience have not managed any type of events. So hopefully today you're going to get some ideas on how you can get something done. It looks like more than 50% of you are familiar with VEXcode VR. The reason I'm asking that question is because we are using VEXcode VR for these virtual events. This is good news for, I will say, more than 50% of you.

Alright, and the last question I wanted to get you guys engaged with is why it's important for students to attend robotics events. Just to read some of your answers: experiences, collaborations, critical thinking, confidence, fun, right? Personally, my team and I believe in some of these answers and the benefits that robotics competitions bring to the students, and how they can definitely impact student achievement in general. This component of education in K-12 is crucial.

Alright, those are great answers. Thank you. Thank you for participating.

Today, I'm going to show you in the presentation how these came up. Why did we start doing events like this one? I'm going to show you exactly how we develop and manage these events in Miami-Dade.

And I'll give you some examples on how we manage the school selection, 'cause again, we're a large school district, how we run it. And then how is it that we support schools and also how we use feedback from teachers and even students to improve our events. 'Cause what I'm gonna be showing you here, some pieces are the iteration for the very first time that we've done it. But this is the fourth year that we've been doing these events. So, obviously, we have improved throughout the years, these events.

So it all started in 2020, the year where we were all challenged, right? By the pandemic. And so our district is, again, so large, we have something called a STEAM designation. And probably some of your district has something similar where schools apply to become STEAM designated. At Miami-Dade, it's a very competitive district. And the moment schools apply to become STEAM designated, they want to achieve their goal status right away. All right? And the only way for schools to achieve the goal status, for elementary schools, they are required to attend at least one robotics competition. And for middle schools and high schools, they're required to attend at least three robotics competitions.

So the moment that we started in 2020, the STEAM department, I don't work for the STEAM department, but the STEAM department of Miami-Dade, they were in trouble, right? They were in trouble. They didn't wanna really go back and change the rubric. They wanted to stick with it, but there was really nothing going on. If you remember, there was a lot of guidance on not sharing the equipment, not just for VEX Robotics, but for every single robotics platform, Sphero, Lego, everybody. And so that's when VEX actually released VEXcode VR. And so what we did is I jumped on it and I said, "You know what? There gotta be something that we can do with VEXcode VR." Kids are home, they're working already via Microsoft Teams or Zoom or something, we gotta be able to come up with something.

So the idea came up based on a challenge, right? That we were facing, all of us facing. And so that's when we started. So we said, "All right, so we got a product, which is VEXcode VR, so with this product, how can we develop a competition?" All right? So we started looking at some of the logistics, how we're gonna do it. Well, we know that we can meet with the kids virtually via Zoom or via Microsoft Teams. Miami-Dade, it's a Microsoft District as well, so we had those tools available. And then, all right, so once we figure that out, what we can do is we can just go ahead and start, but there are a few pieces that you need to think about.

All right? So first of all, you need to schedule and promote your event, right? So you need to pick a day that works for most of your teachers, most for your students. Most likely, it's gonna be either after school or on a Saturday, okay? That's pretty much the choices that we have for events. And then what are you gonna do about your teachers? This is back in 2020, remember, VEX just released VEX VR. So most of our teachers didn't even know that VEX VR was out there, so we needed to train teachers. You probably, if you're thinking about doing something like this for your district, for your school, you probably don't have to worry a lot about teacher training, although that's a component that you wanna definitely add. Part of also the support they're gonna be implemented for your school.

And then, this is something that oftentimes, an event like this one, you cannot do it by yourself. You are gonna need help. You're gonna need help by, you know, you're gonna have to invite other teachers, volunteers. The help, in my case, we invited a few teacher leaders, we call them robotics leaders, which they were gonna be our judges for all of these events. All right? So what is the logistic that we developed? Was a simple logistic. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

Thank you for your attention and support. We look forward to continuing to improve and grow these events with your feedback and participation.

And we say, all right, so first of all, how can we make this event 100% student-centered? How can we do that? Well, very simple. I created a challenge and I did not reveal the challenge until the day of the event. That was the first thing that was a non-negotiable for me, all right?

And so the way we kind of divided the competition, we had a main room in Zoom. We actually did it in Zoom. All the teams came in the main room. And in that, we spent with them about 15, 20 minutes. In those 15, 20 minutes, I explained the teams the challenge. So I revealed the challenge and I gave them the files so they could have access to the challenge, and we went over all the rules, okay?

Once that's done, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, no more than that, every single team goes to a breakout room. And what's gonna happen in each of the breakout rooms? Well, the teams have to have at least four students. And I'm gonna explain why. The coach of the team has to be present. One of our teachers, one of our teacher leaders, one of our judges must be present, and we give them 45 minutes to complete the challenge.

So one of the reasons that our teams for these virtual competitions are up to four students is because part of the rubric that we have for these events is collaboration. And you'll be surprised. I was actually in the classroom for 15 years, and my last seven years I did robotics. Pretty much that's all I did. And I truly believe in the power of collaboration, especially in competition. But when you're doing a virtual event where only one student is sharing the screen and the rest are just collaborating, it makes it a little bit challenging when you have six, seven, eight students to really get insight from all of them to collaborate. We try and we believe it doesn't work. So we believe that a good number is about around four students per team. We don't let any team show up with one student, because then there is no opportunity for collaboration. So teams have to have at least two students, but we encourage all of the teams to have four students minimum so they can do collaboration.

All right, so this is kind of like the main idea for the logistics of the event. But again, because we're managing the entire district, there are things that you have to keep in mind, right? And one of them is teacher training. Back then, in 2020, VEX already had some free resources that we used to train our teachers, right? So first of all, some of us jumped in and started learning the actual code on our own. We used the books that are available for free in the VEX resources. If you're not familiar with them, you can find the VEXcode VR Blocks and also the VEXcode VR Python.

Well, let me take that back, those were the Python version, the actual software was free in 2020 and is no longer free for the last couple of years, but it's still available. We actually used it only for high schools back then in 2020 and then 2021. There are other, there are tons of activities or resources, there are tutorials in VEX. All of those resources are for free. You can use all of them to put together training for your teacher. Personally, in Miami-Dade, for example, we actually offer master plan points for teachers who will come back here to VEX VR and complete those certifications. And the only thing they needed to do is to actually show us proof that they completed the certification. So we kind of encouraged teachers to jump in and learn on their own and all of that. And back then, it was very common to learn on your own in 2020.

All right, so we did all that training with both all the teachers and also our teacher leaders. But before we jumped and used this with students, we were still a little bit hesitant. And we said, "You know what? Let's do an extra day of training for our teacher leaders." And what we did is we did like a mock competition with them.

Thank you for your attention and support. We hope this information helps you in organizing your own student-centered events. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to reach out.

So they came back another day. It was a full day of training, and we had the teachers, like, they were students. We put the teachers in breakout rooms, four or five in each of the breakout rooms. We gave them two challenges that day. They had to do a few things. They had to first solve the challenge in a group, just like the students were going to do later, with one of them sharing the screen and the others collaborating. They needed to do all of that.

When they were finished at the end of the challenge, we gave them 45 minutes for all of that. Then we had them use the rubric to score all the points that they were going to be getting. We then did a team swap and all of that. It was a lot of fun.

What I'm sharing with you now is a sample. It's really not the one that we used for the teachers, but it's from our last virtual event that we did last year. If you scan it, you're going to see the challenge. For those of you who answered yes to being familiar with VEX VR, you'll notice the challenge is similar to some of the activities that VEX VR offers online. The only difference that I want to highlight, if you're looking at it, is that we have two levels, level one and level two. For most of our events, we have three levels.

Level one is an easy level. We want to make sure that all the kids attending events feel successful and that they can do something at these events. If you take a look at level two, you'll see that we're challenging the kids even more. This provides an opportunity for those more advanced kids to show their skills using more advanced blocks, like loops and conditional statements, my blocks, and things like that. It was intentionally done that way.

For all of these events, because sometimes my schedule is really hectic, especially over the last two years, I create what I call possible solutions for my challenge. I share that with all the judges on the day of the competition, not before. This way, they have an idea of what possible answers might be for those challenges. I like to call them possible answers because, as you know, in coding, there is always a possibility of doing something a little bit different. But at least this provides some guidance to your judge if you're not going to be available to be the one judging. This is something that you can do to help them out with scoring later on.

I also share with my coaches and all of the teacher leaders a rubric, some types of guidance that they can use to quantify the points that each team is going to be getting at that competition. This is a sample rubric just to share with you guys so you have an idea of how to come up with something like this if you're planning to do something similar. You do want to have a rubric because you want to be consistent, you want to be fair to all the kids, and you want to make sure that everybody goes through the same process when you're doing scoring.

All right, so we did all of that. You need to keep in mind all the pieces on how you're really going to run the events. You have to plan ahead of time, different pieces. For example, this is kind of like an example. We didn't really follow everything to the T, but it's very close to that. About six weeks before the event, we open registrations. We schedule the day and start promoting using our social media. Four weeks before the event, teams are selected and notified. We open up for about two weeks, and literally in two or three days, we get a bunch of schools that want to participate.

Thank you for your attention and support. We look forward to seeing you at our next event!

As you can imagine, oftentimes it's impossible for Miami-Dade to select every single school that applies to attend. This is primarily because we need to first determine how many judges are available that day to be able to select the teams that are going to compete. I'll explain that better in another slide.

Two weeks before the event, we conduct a webinar with the coaches to explain all the rules. This webinar usually takes 15 to 20 minutes and is optional. If you're a local school that is nearby, you could probably just talk to each other on the phone and get it done. However, we like to have a webinar to address any questions. Teachers often get stressed out when an event is approaching, so it's better to explain some of the rules, expectations, and answer their questions.

A week before the event, we reveal the playground that will be used. We started doing this last year, and this year marks the second year of this practice. Previously, teachers didn't know what the playground would be until the day of the event. However, teachers provided feedback, saying, "Hey Marco, we're really stressed out with everything going on at the school. Could you please at least reveal the playground that is going to be used?" I thought, "Why not?" As long as I don't reveal the actual challenge, I'm okay with telling them what the playground will be.

On the day of the event, we conduct three sessions of 45 minutes each to accommodate as many teams as possible. Just so you know, all of this started because of the challenge that the STEAM department faced. We usually give priority to schools applying to become STEAM designated in Miami-Dade. We have almost 400 schools in Miami-Dade, with almost 200 of them applying to become STEAM designated, so there are a lot of schools interested in this. These numbers give you an idea of how many schools can attend some of these events. It all depends on the volunteers available.

In the last two years, we have not only conducted virtual events but also started face-to-face events. We have something called the Youth Fair event, which occurs every year after the state championship, the VEX IQ, and VEX V5 championship. We started this last year, and my team manages that event. I've included a couple of insights from those events here.

This is a schedule of one virtual competition to give you an idea of how we run it. We have three sessions: one begins at 8:30 AM, another at 10:30 AM, and the last one at 1:00 PM. Please read the note at the bottom: once you have confirmed the number of teacher leaders or judges available to support an event, only then can you offer that same number of spots for the event. This is because you need one judge in each breakout room. For example, for this particular event, we had 10 teacher leaders volunteer. At 8:30 AM, we had five in the elementary division and five in the middle school division. We conducted both divisions simultaneously. If you are only working with your school or multiple schools, it could be easier to handle. We did the same for 10:30 AM and 1:00 PM sessions. We are usually done by 3:00 PM.

By the way, I missed one more row at the end: we also conduct an award ceremony online, which is around 3:00 PM and lasts about 10 to 15 minutes.

Thank you for your attention and support in making these events successful. Your dedication and enthusiasm are greatly appreciated.

From 2:15 to 3:00, we focus on finalizing the scoring for all participants. Afterward, we prepare virtual certificates for the winners in both the middle school and elementary divisions. At 3:00, the students rejoin the Zoom call, and we announce the winners for the event.

I would like to share some of the rules we have developed over the years. These rules have evolved since we first started in 2020, as we have learned and improved. By scanning the QR code, you can view examples of these rules. If you plan to organize a similar event at your school or district, feel free to modify them to suit your needs.

To highlight a few key rules: it is essential that cameras remain on during the event. We want to see the students' and coaches' faces. These general rules are particularly important for the coaches. Coaches are encouraged to motivate the students to collaborate, but they must not assist with coding or similar tasks. We aim to keep the event as student-centered as possible.

One crucial rule is that the competition requires total concentration. We ask that all team members, including coaches, remain stationary with a strong internet connection and refrain from traveling or engaging in other activities. This rule was introduced after the first event when some teachers were multitasking, such as watching their kids play basketball.

We also have specific rules for student participants. We incorporate language from VEX events, emphasizing sportsmanship and respect as part of the scoring rubric. Full team participation is also a component of the scoring rubric, and we encourage collaboration among students.

If you scan the QR code, you will have access to all the rules, which you can use for your event. I want to highlight a few benefits of hosting virtual events. They are very convenient for students, coaches, and district personnel because they can participate from home. We typically hold these events on a Saturday, but some have been scheduled after school.

For teachers who prefer not to travel on a Saturday, participating from home is a great option. The event only requires about one hour of commitment from coaches. If 8:30 is too early, we can schedule your team for 10:30 or 1:00 PM, making it very convenient.

I also support the scheduling for coaches and students if needed. I review all the answers from the teams, and if I notice many mistakes, I reach out via email. Although I try to attend most events, there have been a few I couldn't attend. In those cases, I review the code and email the coaches with feedback.

Thank you for your attention and participation. We appreciate your dedication to making these events successful and enjoyable for everyone involved.

I think you and your team should benefit from a Zoom virtual support with me. And then I follow up with them, and usually, most of the time they schedule with me. Then I meet virtually with the coach and the students, and we go over the challenge and possible solutions. I provide all that feedback.

I do want to highlight also that because we started doing face-to-face events last year in Miami-Dade using VEX VR, there are lots and lots of benefits as well for doing face-to-face events. Obviously, there are some disadvantages of doing face-to-face, like, for example, you have to travel to a place and be there for a few hours. Miami-Dade is almost impossible to travel nowadays with the traffic, just insane. But some of the benefits I wanted to highlight are that the students actually have some time to explain their reasoning in face-to-face events. I actually see every single station, and the kids get to tell me what they're doing and why they're doing it. I give them feedback right away while I'm reviewing the challenge.

I also schedule support with coaches right away. It's a great way for us, district personnel in Miami, to talk to parents. Parents have tons of different questions, and sometimes it's so difficult for them to go into the school, inside the classrooms. This is an opportunity for parents to ask questions. The event is open to the public. Actually, Univision was one of the events. If you go into the very first scan that you did, if you go to the iLearn team, you're gonna see how they highlighted it. Univision highlighted the event.

All right, so real quick, I know my time is almost over, but I wanted to talk about the support. We believe strongly in school support. If you do one training for one day and expect everybody to know everything for the rest of the school year, you're wrong. You need to do that one training or two trainings or three trainings, and then you need to follow up. You need to go to the school, you need to support your teachers. That's the only way that we have found that actually works. We've done a lot of professional learning sessions for teachers. We try to schedule two or three throughout the year. We have a learning management system, Schoology. I don't know if everybody's familiar with Schoology or Canva or one of those learning management systems. We have group supports there, and we are also scheduling more support and things like that.

In addition to that, well, this was my presentation last year. If you were here last year, you probably saw it. We actually built an entire VEX VR and VEX IQ Schoology course for teachers in Schoology. Everything is there. School teachers in Miami-Dade can go in and just grab the entire course and put it in their courses. Florida, anybody from Florida here? Press is big on Florida standards. So what we've done is we selected every single lesson and aligned them to standards. Not just CT standards but also language arts standards, math, science, all of that. Every single unit that we built and used, for the most part, I would say 60% to 65% of the content in here is coming from VEX. The videos, all of that's coming from VEX, but everything else is coming from us.

Every single unit that we have, we include a lesson plan for the teachers, objectives for the lesson, a discussion at the beginning of the lesson, a discussion at the end of the lesson, content tutorials—all of that is coming from VEX sites. We include a formative assessment at the end. Teachers have received so much positive feedback on this because pretty much you can have a non-coder who has never done any robotics and be ready to teach robotics the next day with something like this.

And all of these resources are available for free. You just have to kind of organize it in a way that works for you and your district. Some of the feedback that we have received from these events has helped us improve our practices. Just to highlight one of them, during the very first event that we created, one of the questions required the VR to move around using a coordinate plane with negative values. As soon as the event was finished, one of the coaches called me on my cell and said, "Marco, my students have not learned that yet in math." And I was like, "Oh shoot."

So the next time that we started working... And she was talking about her elementary students, I believe in third grade, that were competing also. We have taken very seriously the issue with the feedback from our teachers. I think that's important too. Don, if you come up with something like this, at the end of the implementation, you want to make sure you survey your teachers, even your students. You want to make sure that you get that feedback and you actually do something about that feedback because they will tell you what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong.

Just for you to know, anybody familiar with Schoology or Canva? Some of you are. So what we did also for the last two years, because we are a Microsoft district, the first two years, we had our students share their code via OneDrive in Microsoft. But last year we decided "Uh-oh, that's too much work." So what we did for the last two years is that we created a course for the competition. We added all the students in this course and all my teacher leaders. These folders here that you see on publish, these are all the resources that my teacher leaders or my judges need. The students are not gonna see those files. Here I got the challenge, the solutions, the rubric, and then a form to submit their scores.

So what is it that the students are gonna see? Well, the students are gonna see the challenge and the students are gonna see... The elementary students are gonna come here and they're gonna submit in an assignment, their code. Easily, I can click on any of these students and I can find their code right here, which I have to download and open in VR, but it's way easier than any other type of way for the students to share the code with you. 'Cause remember, at the end of those 45 minutes, and I think I didn't mention that, but at the end of each of those 45 minutes, the teacher judge, my teacher leader needs to collect that code, right? So you need to collect the code, we need to keep it, so we can actually review it with the group and provide a score. We found that Schoology is actually probably the best way that we found to collect that code.

Alright, so that's pretty much my presentation. I think I went over a little bit of my allotted time. I'm wondering if there are any questions, anything that you wanna know, or any concern that you may have about this implementation?

By the way, just a fact here, right when we launched the very first VR event in 2020, all of our schools are really big on social media and Twitter and started tweeting and all of that. That's when I actually met Jason, Jason McKenna. Jason saw all the tweets and all of that and reached out, "Hey, what's going on in Miami with VEX VR?" We met with them and we started doing this collaboration. Prior to that, we had collaborations with VEX, but it's been growing because of this VEX VR. I was told by Jason that we inspired VEX to do their first online challenges in 2021. So Miami-Dade still got the credit. Well done. (Marco chuckles)

Is there any questions for Marco? No questions? All right.

I think this is a really good example of a sustainable program.

And the other thing, like Marco said, is if schools are doing really great stuff with VEX, it's something that we can begin to offer to the wider public. We have a whole education team, and we can start to build on what everyone else is working on.

Hi, thank you very much for your presentation. It's been helpful. I noticed that you were saying that you create challenges, but all the playgrounds are pretty much set. They have a specific idea in mind. So when you create the challenge, you're not using the pre-designed lesson for that particular playground. You're expanding off of that or changing it completely?

No, it is true. So every single playground has a specific theme, right? But there are always ways to tweak it a little bit and change it a little bit. That's pretty much what we've been doing. We're sticking with the free playgrounds for now. In fact, we started already the collaboration with Jason and VEX because next year, in Miami-Dade, we're actually planning to do a full-day event on VEX VR. And for that, we might need a little bit of help from VEX because we do want to use not the free version, not the free playgrounds, but expand to the other ones. Most of our schools are using the free playgrounds. But there is always a way to work around.

For example, our very last challenge at the face-to-face, we used our canvas playground, all right? And, you know, you'll be surprised. So what can you do in that one, our canvas, well, you can do drawing and all of that. But then you can take a next step and you can start looking at some geometry shapes and some properties, and you can expand that. And so that's the approach that we're going with some of those playgrounds. Trying to find ways to think about something that they probably have not thought about when they use those playgrounds for that matter.

Okay, well, Marco will be around. He'll be at the networking at 4:30 and he'll be around the next couple of days, so please feel free to ask any questions you have.

And Marco, we have a little thank you.

Oh, wow, nice. Thank you. Thank you so much for...

A little thank you.

Oh, wow, nice.

(upbeat music)