Hey guys!
I’m a middle school teacher that just took over our school’s Robotics club. The old advisor couldn’t do it anymore due to time constraints.
Our district just started providing funding for Robotics about last year and we chose VEX robotics, and I’m glad we did. The other robotics products seemed rather pointless. VEX lets the kids actually program AND build their robots.
I’ve mostly been doing purchasing. We got 6 Windows laptops, and a team license of RobotC (6 licenses). I’ve just gotten into the Intro to Robotics Programming Curriculum that RobotC provides, and I’m doing some thinking about how to implement this in our club.
First off, I’ve built an “arena” in the middle of our room, which is basically just a big open space. I notice some of the challenges call for blocks and “rooms”, and mazes. For mazes, I was thinking of using cardboard strips about 6 inches high, with notches cut about halfway through them at their ends, and then notching them together to create mazes. We have a lot of cardboard. Do you think this will work? Are there any other ideas for building mazes?
As for blocks, it happens that my science students create “Element Cubes” which look about the same size as the blocks Vex uses. I was just going to have the kids cover them in colored paper. And then I was going to use some foam core board to create the “rooms” which will just be cut into squares, and outlined in black tape to simulate the walls, because the rooms need to be randomized, so I can just pick up the boards and interchange them. Any ideas on these fronts?
Also I was wondering, do you think it’s worth it to also purchase a team license of Virtual Worlds? We have full physical robot kits (more than enough to create a fleet of robots), and the website seems to market Virtual Worlds towards those who don’t have the physical robots. But the images I see of the virtual worlds look pretty cool and might provide a break from physical robotics every now and then. Some of the challenges can only be done on Virtual Worlds as well. What do you think?
Thanks for entertaining my questions! We have enough funding that I’m thinking of bringing our kids to a competition next year or at least a field trip somewhere.
Aloha pergrin,
I am happy to welcome you to the VEX family. For starters, VEX offers two main competition platforms which are VEX and VEX IQ. VEX is a metal robotics kit offered mainly to middle, high and college students. VEX IQ is a plastic kit mainly offered to elementary and middle school students. My question is which program are you referring to? This forum is mainly for VEX IQ. There is a VEX forum also. Let me know and I’ll be glad to help.
-BAILEY
Welcome to the wonderful world of VEX IQ robotics. I’ve been coaching VEX and/or VEX IQ for the past four years and I still feel like most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing. Fortunately teaching robotics is something that’s very difficult to mess up. Pretty much as long as the students are building robots they’re learning. It doesn’t matter how simple or complex it is or even if it works or not. And most students are more than happy to jump right in.
I coached five VEX IQ teams this year, four per team for a total of twenty students. When I sent out the announcement in the fall I ended up with forty-seven applications. Next year I’m going to add a stricter screening process. Now that the season is over I brought in a new group of students to learn some of the basics of programming and robot design, it’s been a lot of fun so far.
So here’s my advice, if you’re making up your own challenges have them do programming stuff first. Once they figure out the robot can be driven by remote control that’s all they’re going to want to do. The challenges you mentioned sound good, here are a few others you might try:
Drag racing, this is pretty self explanatory. It teaches students about gear ratios and if you make narrow lanes that the robots have to stay in it teaches about wheelbase design as well. It can be done as a programming challenge or as driver control. (getting the robots to travel in a straight line is harder than you think)
Line following, this is a very challenging activity and requires a lot of trial and error. I tried this and only had one team actually make it all the way around the course I made. I would only recommend this for students that are serious about programming.
Robot soccer, you can make your own field or you can take a VEX IQ field and remove one wall section from each end of the field and use the gap as a goal. You can use whatever you want as a ball, the three inch cubes available from VEX work well. You can use a round ball as well but they’re more difficult to control so it adds more difficulty/randomness. Matches are usually played 2v2.
Hungry hungry robos, this is a game I made up that uses a VEX IQ field and a set of three inch cubes. Build the field into a square and remove one wall piece from each side. Put all the cubes in the center of the square, whichever robot can push the most cubes into their goal in one minute wins. (you can also take all the cubes of one color and start with them in the corners so they’re hard to get and have them be worth double)
Robot sumo, this has been the most popular activity so far. What can I say, students love crashing robots into each other. For the field I just took two long strips of butcher paper and taped them together into a large square. The rules are simple, if any part of the robot touches outside of the paper they’re out. Students learn very quickly that power doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have friction, and friction is useless when your wheels are off the ground. It very quickly turns into “how to flip another robot while avoiding being flipped yourself” there’s a lot of learning about structure, power and friction in this activity.
Capture the flag, I have not tried this one yet, it’s still just a theory. The idea is to use the classroom as the playing field and go by the same basic rules of capture the flag. I’m going to have the students put bumper switches on the robots and write a custom driver control program that will disable the robot for ten seconds when a bumper on the back is pushed. Also they would have a bumper on the side that could revive it early. The idea is that hitting the back switch would be like tagging someone, and the side switch would be so a teammate could help.
For some of the challenges I mentioned that might not be as exciting for students (like drag racing for example) it helps to have prizes to give to the teams that “win” (however you want to define that term). One nice thing about doing your own challenges is that you can switch to a new activity if students start to get bored (and they will).
As for the VEX IQ challenge, if you have the budget to participate then you definitely should. It teaches valuable lessons in teamwork and sportsmanship. The way the tournaments are set up teams are randomly paired together, so there’s incentive to actually help teams from other schools rather than trying to sabotage them. There is a strong sense of community and mutual respect even though everyone is trying to be the best team there. All in all it’s pretty amazing.
For me an ideal teaching situation would be to have classes that focus on small, in-house challenges for students that are starting out. And if a student has been through the basics and still wants to do robotics then they can participate in the VEX IQ challenge. Because the challenge is a long term problem students who aren’t as enthusiastic about robotics tend to come up with a robot that is “good enough” and spend the rest of the season being bored.
Hi! I am using Vex IQ, and I realized that they offer a bevy of products because I first put my introduction in the VEX EDR forum before I realized my mistake and came here. LOL. So thanks for checking.
Thanks for all of the ideas! I will definitely implement some of those challenges.
And yes, I definitely have noticed some of what you said. We started our club very late in the year (so they’re going out for summer quite shortly), and me and the other teacher had no idea what we were doing. We just had kids check out the kits and start building according to the instructions. We had some students from the previous year who knew more than us, so we had them helping the newer kids. Of course they figured out how to use the remote controls, and now all they want to do is race/battle/etc. Which they do and get bored of quickly, so we’re seeing a drop in membership because they’re essentially just making RC cars.
I found this curriculum: http://www.education.rec.ri.cmu.edu/previews/robot_c_products/teaching_rc_vex_iq/?_ga=1.194597101.133162314.1458764468
Which I’m going to have students do. Taking away Modkit will throw them off kilter as well and have to learn things from scratch, I hope, which will give them more of an incentive to learn how to program.
Another thing I forgot to mention is tug of war. It was actually my student’s idea but I didn’t have any string at the time so we’ll try it next week. It would be a good one to teach them how to attach something securely with IQ parts, as well as learning about friction and power.
Aloha Peregrin,
It is great that you have decided to coach a VEX IQ team and/or teams. The next step on your journey is to determine whether you will be using VEX IQ for the Classroom or for Competition. In general, the parts and projects for Classroom and Competition should be kept separate. I believe kids have a greater experience in VEX IQ if they can return the next day and still see their “Work in Progress” in one piece so that they can continue on their creations.
PLTW primarily uses VEX IQ kits for their elementary lessons. If your school is a PLTW school then this would be something to look into. These kits are great for students to create different types of simple machines that can be used to solve problems. How do we lift a box from the floor to the table? How do we use scissor lifts? And also testing scientific principles such as friction and measurement of distances.
Competition is a great way to get the kids excited about robots also. I have come across many teachers that share their apprehension to bring their teams to competitions because they feel the kids just are not ready. I always urge them to bring the kids to competitions. VEX IQ has done a great job providing instructions to build a simple Claw Bot. Even with this simple robot students can score and have a great time. There are also many different awards offered that teams could very well leave with a trophy. Competitions truly open the eyes of the students to the building possibilities or their robots. Usually my kids come back from competition even more excited to build their next iteration. I strongly encourage all coaches to just jump head first into the competitions. No team jumps into these competitions early in the season and has the “Award Winning Robot”. It takes experience. These competitions provide that and it allows students to modify their bots and prepare for the next competition. VEX does a great job in this by allowing students to constantly change their robot design.
As a last plug for competitions, all of the kids at these events are awesome. They are well behaved, respectful and excited to learn. For that small percentage that are not, parents are always willing to get their kids back on track quickly. All of the parents are awesome too. I feel confident in saying that these robotics kids are the type of kids I would want my personal kids hanging out with. Smart, driven, multi talented and very respectful.
Best of luck for a great season!!
-BAILEY
Capture the flag didn’t work as well as expected, it just turned into one robot pinning the flag somewhere and the other robots crashing into it trying to get it. So I turned it into capture the flags. Instead of one flag I used the entire set of hexballs (colored cubes would work too, you could even have three teams if there were enough students). Start with all the blue and orange hexballs in their respective bases. Then set a timer (3-5 mins depending on field size) at the end of the match each team gets one point for each hexball of their own color that is still in their base and two points for each hexball of the opposing team’s color that is in their base. It worked much better that way, it was by far the most popular thing we did.
My daughter’s middle school does not have a program and we live about an hour from any Vex team. I just purchased the Vex IQ super kit for my child’s Xmas present (still awaiting kit arrival). I have no idea how to use this and no experience
kits or robotics (but I am a sensor guy and I do code). So, I can’t thank @peregrin5 enough for starting this thread as well as @Bez for all the great ideas. I will be working with my daughter at home on this and I know from experience with other techie toys that if there isn’t a set of challenges the toy just sits in a corner and collects dust. I hope others keep this thread going with more ideas I can use at home. The $$ for the super kit was hard part with so I will have to make my own arena and obstacles…I’m thinking kitchen floor. Anyway, please keep the ideas flowing and any other tips on how to start teaching this product to a 6th grader.
There are multiple other threads on how to get started with IQ. Go check them out!
Yes thanks @Doctortictac