VEX Robotics Educators Conference. My name is Erin Lowery and I am the coordinator of robotics for Prince William County Schools. And I get to talk about, I think what is arguably my most favorite thing ever. And that's Unified Robotics. It started as my then director said, hey, you're going to do this. And quickly became passion project from there. So just a little bit of background about Prince William County Schools, if this is going to work. Oh, turn it on.

So this is where we're from. It's in Northern Virginia. That's us there in the red. We're the second largest school district in our state. And we serve approximately 90,000 plus students in our district across 99 schools. Ninety five or excuse me, 94 of our schools offer at least one of our robotics platforms. We have eight of them. And in that community, we serve about three thousand kids. Number fluctuates from year to year. These are the platforms that we offer. We have our hands deep in a lot of things. And we do this to offer as many different opportunities for our students as possible to try and reach as many as we can. And of course, the new one down there at the bottom for this year was Unified Robotics. Before I get into talking about how we did it, how we implemented the steps that we took, I want to start with an understanding of what Unified Robotics is and what it is not. I believe that that is a very important place to start. Unified Robotics is an inclusivity program. It's a partnership between students with intellectual disabilities and the general education population. Our county serves approximately 13,500 special education students. That students with IEPs, 504s, but for unified, we target a very specific population within the special education world.

And those are your self-contained students, your inclusion students in our county. We call them level two. So whatever your wording is, those are the students that we're going after. These are students with Down syndrome, high functioning autism and many other different types of intellectual disabilities. The approach here was this is a very marginalized group and we want to make sure that they feel included in our larger community as well. So it's built on this equal partnership and a shared responsibility. It is not your general education student coming in and doing all of the work and allowing a SPED student to stand there and say that they were a part of it. This, I think arguably is the most important part, is the collaboration, the communication and the teamwork that they are given the opportunity to work on. Not just our special education students, but their general education partners as well. We don't change anything about the process. They are a part of our robotics community. It's aligned with the standards of how our competitive process works. We don't lower the expectation for our kids. We give them an entry point to be allowed to compete with our kids. And it builds and we saw it firsthand, their confidence and their leadership.

The leadership aspect, not that our SPED students don't have leadership capabilities because they do, but it also gave our general education students an opportunity to really show their leadership skills as well. And so that's what Unified is.

Unified is not a segregated program from our larger robotics community. It is a part of it. And like I was saying earlier, those SPED kids are not observers. It's not general education kids coming in and doing all of the work. And our SPED students get to watch and say they participated. They are active partners in the process. And it's not a compliance based thing. It's not a check the box. Yep, we included these kids. It is a true inclusion program. And not only when inclusion is convenient to highlight, look at what we do, it truly is an inclusion experience. That's really important to understand is that inclusion is at the heart of all of it.

Like I said, we don't lower the expectations. They still have to meet the expectations of the competitive program. We adapt for them. We modify for them. We give them an entry point. We make it accessible for them. But they still have to meet the expectations of the program. We do not use those students without disabilities as supervisors for the SPED students either. It really truly is a partnership between the SPED population and our general education kids. We do not advertise it as a special education activity only. It is advertised as an opportunity to participate, regardless of ability or disability.

Yes, the robot is important. Coding is important, right? That's the key to being able to compete. But it is not what we pour all of our attention into. And we don't treat it as less than anything else that we offer our students.

I can't stress it enough. I tell my kids, my students all the time, right? If I'm repeating something a lot, it must be because it's important. That whole piece about working together, the teamwork, the sharing of the responsibilities, actively participating on both sides is very important to the unified process.

The inclusion of it all is the main event of this. It's the purpose behind doing it and making sure that these SPED students know that they are included, that they belong in this program. And that they can do it. They can build a robot. They can code. They can participate just as much and just as well as their general education counterparts can.

And arguably, the best part for me is that building of meaningful relationships between the SPED population and the general education side. So that robot might be the vehicle, but it's the people and the relationships that are the outcome of it.

So why does it matter?

Inclusion is one piece of it. Yes, we want them to feel included.

Oftentimes, they're left out of so much. And so we want to put our best foot forward in making sure they understand that they are included. They do belong here with us. And it gives them the opportunity to work on those lifelong skills as listed up here. It gives them accessibility to STEM. STEM is for everybody. I was speaking to someone earlier about it. STEM is not just for our general education population or your SPED with IEPs and 504s. It's meant for everybody. It's beneficial to everybody. We keep those high expectations. We don't change that for them. We all live in the real world. And we know that expectations are not going to be lowered for them out there in the real world. So we want to mimic that experience for them here. My favorite part is the belonging in the community of it, knowing that they belong a part of our robotics community and that we love having them there and being able to support them. And then the real world preparation. And your soft skills, right? You're collaborating, communicating, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking, and that piece about failing. We heard it earlier today. We've heard it throughout sessions the last day and a half we've been here.

In our world, failure is not only acceptable. It's expected. We know that our students are going to fail along the way. For so long, in their worlds outside of this community, they're taught you can't fail. You got to pass this. You have to do that. You have to do this. And with robotics, we know that failure is a part of the learning process, right? That stereotypical first attempt in learning. That's really what it is. And so we're giving them all this real world preparation.

And it's not just the kids that are affected. It's the school community and the community that surrounds, right? That stronger school culture. There's not any segregation. There's not a divide. It's not general here and sped over here. We're creating that truly inclusive environment, not just within the robotics community, but within the greater school that they're a part of. And for us, within the greater school division that they're a part of. Those meaningful relationships are so important. It's important to me as the adult getting to watch them do it, but it's just as equally important to the students participating.

We've got students that participated that I never felt included, never felt like they had a friend. And then we were able to provide this experience. And now they feel like I have friends. I belong. I can do this and want to do it again and keep doing it. Now they're telling all their friends about it. We do see an increase in student engagement, not just with attendance and making sure we come to school so that we can go to the practice and do the things. But we see it in the classroom as well. When we give kids a safe space to experiment, to fail, and know that they're not going to get in trouble for doing it, builds their confidence, leads to the higher engagement in the classroom.

And there's the expectations comment again. That's really important to understand about unified, right? We're not going to take something that lives in this level of expectation and lower it for them. That's not doing a service for anybody when we do that. We also want them to know that it's for all of them, not just expectations for the general education side. It's for the SPED students as well. And then we get to empower our educators that are involved in this as well. We see more of that collaboration between SPED educators and general educators in being inclusive of that piece as well. Unified focuses so much on the inclusion and the partnership between students that we tend to leave out and or forget. There's also that happening with the adults in the room as well.

Here's what they're learning. And this is by no means an exhaustive list. These are like the highlights, the big pieces that I noticed and observed along the way. Up the top there is the STEM and the technical skills. Yep, that's them learning how to build. That's them learning how to code and look at those directions and figure things out specifically for that material robot and their code. And that is fantastic. I like that part. But to me, that's not the important piece up there. It's not the most important piece up there. They're working on those so-called soft skills. I think Jason was the one that talking about it yesterday morning. Soft skills is a misnomer. We know that they're not. They're learning how to collaborate with their general education population. But they're also learning that their contribution matters.

They're learning those communication skills. And that's the leadership piece again. And to me, probably the most important thing on this screen is empathy. Most of us or all of us live in an educational world. And how many can agree that empathy is lacking in our student population? And it's probably lacking in our adult population as well. But this gives our students the opportunity to not just learn about what it means to be empathetic, but to actually do it, to actually practice empathy. And then we're working on everybody's confidence. And getting them ready for those real world interactions once they're not in school anymore. And our SPED students, our SPED population that we target with Unified, deserve the opportunity to learn these things just as much as our general education side does.

So simply put, Unified Robotics allows our students to show their ability beyond the disability. The disability starts to disappear. And they're just kids partnering with each other to be able to build and code a robot and play a game. The focus shifts from why they can't to all the reasons for why they can.

So how did we do it? I have been coming to the educator conference for this is my fourth year coming. Last year, I sat right where you are and listened to a conversation from a different school district about their Unified program. And my director said, you're going to do this. And I said, okay. And the coaches that I brought with me, I looked at them and I said, you're going to do it. And thankfully, they said, okay.

We connected with the speakers that are up there on the board. They got me in contact with Jason. And then Jason got me in contact with the actual teachers that were doing it in Woodland Hills. And that was Tina Dietrich, who's running around here somewhere. She did the engineering notebook session yesterday.

She graciously allowed myself and our coaches to come to their fall professional development. So we can learn about not just implementing Unified, but what does it actually look like? What are the coaches doing? What are the SPED teachers doing? What does the modified game look like? And how do we help our students understand the expectation or the expectational difference between Unified and the general education side of robotics? So we took all that awesome information and we brought it back to the school district. And we started to put things into motion. It started with three middle schools. I went to each school and had a meeting with their admin, their VEX coach, a SPED person. Some schools, it was the department chair. Others, it was a SPED teacher that wanted to be involved. And we started having the conversations about getting these things started in their school and getting them excited about doing it. I will say this. I'm not very fearful about doing new things, but I was worried about asking our SPED teachers to take on yet something else, putting something else on their plate. But I will say this. I didn't get a single no. I had teachers jumping at the chance to be allowed to do it.

So that fear very quickly went away. And so then it became delegating duties. All right, I'm going to bring this to you and here's what I need you to do as coaches. You're going to work on your schedule. When are you going to practice? And I had a school that practiced in the middle of the day during their students' advisory time. And then I had schools that did it after school. I had one school that did it on the same day he was running his V5. They were just in a separate room. And then I had one who did it on the off days from his V5 practices. And so the schedule really truly is up to you and your SPED department. And if your admin has input in terms of what you want that to look like. Our SPED teachers took care of the parent permission and making sure that these parents on the special education side particularly were okay with their students participating. Again, another kind of a fearful moment for me. But we had wild success. Not a single parent told us no. Some of us had to work out transportation, especially the ones working after school. A lot of these students are on those specialized buses. And so those are just, you know, kinks you have to work out along the way to figure out how to make it work for your students, your coaches, your school.

There were conversations about cost.

My schools did not pay for a single penny to have this program in their school. I took care of that cost for them. I'm the district person for the school system. I bought the equipment. I bought the field, the game elements. I made sure with help from one of my coaches that they got t-shirts. And ordering the medals that they got to the 3D printing of their trophies. Any costs associated with doing it, I took care of that for them. And then taking time to train their SPED counterparts. I know that we have special education teachers that are coaches, but far more often they're not. And so they needed training as well. Basic things. How do we access directions for how to build? Where do I go to find that? Basic directions for how to do some block coding with them. We took time to go into the schools and make sure that SPED teachers were as comfortable as we could get them. Some were more comfortable than others with it. The other partnership that we created was with our special education representative for our area. When I contacted him, his name is Tyler. Tyler said, Erin, I have no clue what I'm doing with this. I said, cool, because neither do I. We're going to learn this together.

And so it's not just a partnership with the kids. It's partnerships with the community, the greater community as well. And Tyler and I are still figuring out how do we work together for this? And what is special education's role in it versus ours? But we have determined after getting through our first season with this, that we're going to work together to get it out to other school districts in our area and continue to spread it throughout this state of Virginia.

So there's a big difference between what I do as the district person and what my coaches did. I gave the coaches the ability to be able to do this, but they went and they did the work. They were the ones that worked with the kids. So my role in all of this is to drive the bus. I'm the one that said, we're going to do it. Let's figure it out. I funded everything and provided all of the training and support and the game manuals. You get a modified game manual for the IQ game for the season. And that comes from, I think I got it from Jason, but it comes from VEX. We do not modify it, it comes from them. I took care of everything with coordinating for our events. I worked with the coach at the school where we were hosting to make sure we had space and all the equipment needed to host the events. I did, hopefully I did justice by them by taking as much off of their plate for them to just be able to work with their students. I took the rest of the responsibility for them. And then once we got rolling, we hosted monthly meetings, check-ins with each other. And it's everything from what's going well, what are you struggling with, what additional support do you need from me? The coaches here are doing the real work though.

They are what make that bus move. They are the link between me and the SPED department of their school. They're the ones that are working with the students weekly, bi-weekly practices, whatever their schedule was to help teach them how to build and code and how to have the general education work with the special education students. And of course, they've got to learn how to play the game, right? Point of doing it. And then providing that feedback back to me. We were all new at it. None of us knew what we were doing. And so it was really important to me to get the feedback from them, not only about what I was doing for them or not doing for them, but what was happening in their sessions with the kids so that we could all learn from each other and continue to make it better.

These are the logistics of how to implement programs. IQ is the platform used for Unified. So we make sure that there's all the build equipment. I bought competition kits for them. If they didn't already have an IQ field, we made sure they had a field. And then of course, the game elements for that season's game. And then the iPad or laptop, whatever the school is providing for students to come in. And then we have the game manual. We also get the Unified game manual. Again, that comes from VEX. And then on my table out there, you see it. There are specific awards for Unified. We don't give out the typical design and excellence and those things. They're very specific awards for Unified. These field risers. That's what these things are right here.

I'm going to leave it at that. Putting those things together. We thought we were going to be set up in four hours and it was seven. So it was an experience. But the field risers are important when we're talking about accommodations for the kids. One of the schools had a gentleman in a wheelchair. So there was no conceivable way that we were going to have fields on the floor. So we had to do the field risers.

And although they were a pain in the butt, they were worth it. We also provided quiet rooms. Although I don't think at any point any of our students use them. We did provide them with only three schools participating. Each school had two teams. We only had six. So it wasn't this massive overwhelming event for them. But we also know that overstimulation happens very quickly. So we want to make sure that we provided a space for them to go to if a de-escalation needed to happen. And they just needed a moment for themselves. And then one of the things we did work with Special Olympics on was making sure that our event spaces were ADA compliant. That's really important.

What we're seeing here is we're talking about actually hosting events. I think a lot of us are familiar with how to host an event. And a unified event is not a huge departure from hosting a general education IQ or V5 event. It's actually very similar. Some of the biggest differences really were the field risers as an accommodation. But it's on a super small scale, which is really nice. That is a nice departure from a normal event. Much smaller, only lasts about four hours or so, depending on how many teams that you have. But we did two competition fields. And then, of course, I didn't think about taking pictures until I realized I needed a picture of it. But we had two competition fields. We had a skills field in the back here. And then down this hallway over here, we had a practice field for them. And going back to the conversation about expectations and not lowering them, the skills field. We gave them opportunity to do skills as well. Not many of them took on the challenge of the coding runs. But a lot of them went over and did their driver runs back there.

Because we had four fields, we had four field risers. One laptop and a new line or smart board, whatever you have at your school. I did not set up field monitors for timing. I went and got kitchen timers. They sat on a desk on the backside of the field. And our head ref or our emcee or whoever was around to be able to reset the time, they just ran off of timers. With unified, well, with IQ in general, we know that there is a sharing of the driving, right?

First student drives for a period of time, timer goes off, they hand the controller over. With unified, we lengthen that time. So one student gets to drive for a full minute, then we stop the timer and allow them time to hand off. We're usually in the five to 10 second range or so with the handoff. But we also don't rush them. Head ref makes sure both sides are ready to go again before we set the timer for the other minute for the second driver to be able to drive. And we just run them off. I think you can see it right here. It's a little kitchen timer I got off of Amazon.

And then there's your awards, whatever you're going to hand out as your awards, your trophies, your medals, whatever you're going to offer the students, making sure that you have your key volunteers in place. My goal for events was to provide the most authentic robotics experience that we could give them. They went through inspection. They had to stand at queue tables. They had to wait their turn. We ran things on time. They had a match schedule. They had judge interviews. We made it as authentic as we possibly could. And then we made sure we had those key volunteers in place. I had a judge advisor. I had judges. I had a queueer. We had inspectors, field resetters, referees, a head ref. All the things you would see at a general education event is what we try to offer here for our unified kids.

I'm going to leave this here for you to read at your own pace. But it was really important for me to share with you not just my perspective of our implementation process and how things went, but from the perspective of key volunteers and our coaches. I highlighted what I felt was the most important piece about what they said. And it's interesting to me to read about the different perspectives. When I asked our volunteers and our judges to give this information back to me, it was very humbling and heartwarming to read about what they wrote. And inclusion matters. And they were able to see it as well. This one I really took to that comment. It was very exciting to see how each of the level two students were able to develop their own techniques and skills, create strategies of their own, and then shared with their general education partners. And then their gen ed got on board and tried out their ideas. They are fully capable of participating just as our general education students are. And being able to watch that unfold has been probably one of the best parts about doing this.

And these are our kids this year. These are all six teams. This is at the end of the first event that we hosted. When we were giving out awards and things like that, I loved them all. But that one was my favorite. Mason was very excited about getting that award.

I'm going to show you a video here in a few slides. And Mason, this one over here in the corner, was interviewed. So you'll get to see Mason speak here in a little bit.

But they're just excited to be included. To be given the opportunity.

All right, so here's our video.

Our communications department came to this event and put it together.

Today is our very first unified event being held here at Graham Park Middle School. We have three middle schools participating today. We have Fred Lynn, Graham Park, and Lake Ridge. We have two competition fields that the kids are playing on. It's two teams each working together to score as much as they can. And they have a two-minute period to do it. This program is very special because Prince William County does a great job with unified sports. So unified robotics fits in perfectly, allowing our students access and an opportunity to participate in our larger robotics program.

I like working with my teammates on just problem solving and figuring out how to code and do all these new and fun things that we get to do in unified robotics. Robotics is a nice coding. It also helps when you want your future plans. Like, what if I want to code gaming or do my own robotics class? It's all of that that makes it really important. And also helping those around you. It builds great teamwork. It teaches them skills outside of the classroom. And it's something that they look forward to.

See for yourself how excited they are to be there and to participate. In our second event, I was able to spend a little bit more time not worrying about the event running well, but sitting in talking to the parents and asking them their thoughts and opinions about their children being involved. And what were their kids coming back and telling them about their experience? And it was overwhelmingly an exciting and positive experience, not just for the kids, but for their parents as well. Our county really does do a good job with unified sports, but not every kid is an athlete. And so this again offers students a different opportunity to be included and to be involved. This year we started with three. Next year we're adding nine more and we'll push to 12. Maybe more. We'll see what happens. And this is not me reaching out and asking. This was other schools coming to me and saying, I like what you're doing. Can we do it too?

It's really important to push the inclusivity. I can't say it enough making sure that this population of students feels included in doing something like this. They only make it better.

This information is also on my table out there. The two QR codes up here will lead you to the unified playbook, which is literally if you really don't know what to do or where to start, the playbook is really going to help you. It breaks it down by session. Your sessions can last however many practices or whatever length of time it takes for you to get through that session, but it breaks it down for you by session how to work with the students to get them involved and unified. What does a practice look like? How do I help them build? How do I help them code? We do engineering notebooks with them as well. They do not look the same as our general education population, but we do do the notebook process with them as well. How do we teach them how to play the game? Preparing them for an event. After the event happens, how do we reflect about how that event went and how do we prepare for the next one? So the playbook really does a good job of breaking that down and offering other resources.

So that's one piece. If you are looking to then host a unified event, that's the other QR code up here just to help you put the event together. Specifically for unified. It really goes deep into the accommodation side of things and making sure that you are accommodating the variety of abilities or disabilities in the room, but also making sure that you are ADA compliant. That is my contact information. I am more than willing to share everything that I have with anybody who wants to go on this adventure. I promise you it will be one of the best decisions that you will ever make in introducing this into your county, your school district, your school, whatever means which you choose to introduce this to your special education platform. And that's all I've got for you. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to stand on my soapbox and share something that I really love to talk about.

We have time if anyone has any questions to ask. The website made it seem like you are almost exclusively with like Lego kits, but now you're talking about competitions with VEX. I was wondering if that's like a new development or is it something?

Which one do you work with most? For unified specifically, we use VEX IQ.

I am not in a position to look at the first side of things yet or using a different platform outside of IQ because VEX only works with IQ for their unified. At this time, we're only at the middle school level. Next year, we're pushing into more of our middle schools and into our high schools. At some point down the road, we will then push into our elementary. We have 69 elementary schools. It's a lot to take on, but we will do that with IQ. And so if you're wanting to implement unified through VEX, it will be with the IQ platform. And they do all the work of modifying everything. You just have to implement it. Thank you.