I’ve been teaching for quite a while, but will only be on my 5th year coaching next year. I would like to ask opinions of those of you that are more seasoned. I’d love if you could reply with your answers to help give me ideas for starting off on the right foot next year.
(I will have 2 classes next year with 12 students in each class)
What is your ideal team size?
Paper or digital notebooks?
Individual or team notebooks?
Do you make brand new teams build the hero bot? ( I did this with all my new ones this past year to get them VEX building experience)
Do your students start building before school starts?
Any other huge tips that you’ve learned when it comes to coaching or team management?
Is this for the VEX V5 competition?
I’ll assume it is, sorry if it’s not but this should still be relevant.
Digital notebooks definitely.
Can be worked on from anywhere, no worrying about handwriting or losing the notebook or forgetting it or it being damaged. Easy to add pictures from online, and no printing anything out. It’s definitely the better option.
I don’t really understand what you mean by individual or team notebooks, VEX teams need to notebook as a team. I wouldn’t recommend only having one person who writes in the notebook, but having someone who oversees it might not be a bad idea.
Our teams usually have 3-4 people, 5 if you can do some real convincing.
digital
???????
New teams take a robotics I class before doing competition to learn the basics. they build the medbot, them a simple competition with free build.
We can request to, but we usually don't. We also have 2 classes, so I have no idea if the team I'll be with the whole summer will make it to competition.
HS V5RC Team coach. We had seven 'bots last year and let the team size get out of control. This year, we are limiting teams to 4 full-time and 2 part-time members. We are after school only and have quite a few who are also in one or more of sports, music, or drama.
We have a V5RC feeder program from our middle schools, so anyone that comes in as a freshman with that experience can start design from “scratch” kids that join and have no experience with VEX build the hero just to get a handle on the parts and how to assemble a drivetrain and mechs.
We start with notebooks and design work in the summers with a chance for prototyping. (We’re pushing them away from ad-hoc building.)
I’m a student, not a coach, but I think this is still relevant.
5 people is the most that I would recommend, as any more than that can lead to too many people fulfilling the same roles.
My team has used digital this year, and it is far better than physical as it allows multiple people to work on it at the same time and in different places, which we did a lot during the season.
Not exactly sure if you mean (obviously there must be one notebook for the whole team for judging).
This may just be misinterpretation on my part, but you can’t make your teams build something. It isn’t allowed. Obviously you can suggest it and provide the instructions, though.
Yes, my coach organizes two camps; one for the incoming sixth graders, where incoming eighth graders teach on all of the subjects, and one for starting building, notebooking, ad designing. Additionally, she let my team bring home parts and a mobile goal during the summer.
If OP wants their teams to build the hero bot first to understand the basics of VEX that’s fine, the issue would be if they wanted to compete with it. However, just having the teams build the hero bot to be played around with and then dismantled, would fall under teaching
I like our max team size of 24 students split between 6 teams.
We have a dedicated notebook mentor so digital to make reviews more streamline, we also prefer one notebook per team shared between the students of that team.
I personally avoid the hero bots for new teams and instead have them look at teams from past seasons to gain an understanding of the common build practices. This worked well enough to the point my youngest/newest students were tournament champions for their last local event.
We’re an after school program so we meet once a week in the summer to start developing.
Tips:
Give your younger students more attention. Help them grow earlier so they become more autonomous and motivated in the later seasons.
Obtain a practice field ASAP
Keep an ample supply of pneumatics and omni and flex wheels
Make sure you’re keeping parents in the loop on progress and scheduled events.
Instead of a hero bot build, we do a basic drivetrain. It teaches the same skills, allows for more creative solutions, and doesn’t give you exact specifications on how to build it. The drivetrain is also a short build, allowing students to get right into the action and in a great base for some teams to go from.
Team notebooks?? It doesn’t make sense for individual, but the notebook will be split into different sections and the person who is strongest in those areas will be writing the most part of those sections.
I think this is generally misinterpreted. Though some new teams may be still learning and use hero bots, a lot of new teams join the season with a lot of new ideas and creativity and I think that it’s best to help and support those ideas.
We present them as an option for new teams, but they are not required. They are a great starting point if a team is new to the V5 system and is intimidated by it. Our next suggested starting point is to build a drivetrain by following an online tutorial.
This year, we had a starter team of 3 that chose to build and improve a herobot. Once their season ended (at states) and they indicated a desire to return, we tasked them individualy with building and coding slightly different drivetrains (with screw joints). After that, they had to add a lifting mech.
I think this critical - Herobots are flawed in design, so students can build upon them. I think if teams use Herobot as their starting point, they must have some improvement they made to the design before competing with them. (time permitting).
I agree 100% with thi. However, I often see teams using the herobot with NO modifications to it. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think teams should not be allowed to have a EXACT copy of the hero bot. They can modify it, like add a piece to make descoring easier, but they shouldn’t just build the robot from the instructions and be done with it. This will probably be almost impossible to enforce, but I think it will be beneficial to everyone.
DIGITAL- all team members can contribute simultaneously
Individual or team notebooks?
Team- we compete so individual notebooks don’t make sense
Do you make brand new teams build the hero bot? ( I did this with all my new ones this past year to get them VEX building experience)
No. The hero bot is typically a point of entry, and does not necessarily include the level of build quality that my teams typically use. Instead, during our first weeks of practice I have the experienced students teach the new ones the tips and tricks to having good build quality (screw joints, multiple points of connection, boxing c-channels, etc)
Do your students start building before school starts?
Depends on the year. In years where we have entire teams returning, and they have completed the beginning of their notebook (game analysis, subsystem research, etc) they might start building during summer practices. If not, we wail until official practices have started during the school year. We go back in mid July though, so we really don’t have a long summer break.
Any other huge tips that you’ve learned when it comes to coaching or team management?
All decisions should be made in the best interest of the teams. Be as fair and equitable as possible.
What is your ideal team size?
I’m probably going to get a lot of disagreements for this, but I like about 6 people per team. 7-8 isn’t bad, either. Granted, 6 people typically includes 2 who aren’t as involved (I think someone referred to them as part-time members). Above 8 is doable but involves a lot of organization, as is less than 6 (but most of your members need to be all in if you’re doing a smaller team).
Paper or digital notebooks?
Digital 100%. Possible for multiple people to edit at once, harder to lose, and most comps (at least in my region) require digital notebooks, so it’s easier to have it already online rather than scan the entire notebook each comp. Plus, messy handwriting isn’t an issue.
Individual or team notebooks?
I mean, if you’re competing as a VEX team, you kinda need a team notebook to be eligible for judged awards.
Do you make brand new teams build the hero bot? ( I did this with all my new ones this past year to get them VEX building experience)
Depends on the year. My organization has both HS and MS teams, and we typically have MS build the herobot as they typically have no experience working with similar parts. Sometimes HS does, other times, we just split the newbies onto their teams and have the returning members teach the newbies how to build. Definitely worthwhile though, in my opinion.
Do your students start building before school starts?
Yeah, we meet over the summer 1-2x a week, but it’s not mandatory, and plenty of people skip meetings to go on vacation and whatnot. (my organization is very flexible with missing meetings generally, though) We typically try to get the drivetrain done and lots of brainstorming over the summer, plus all the newbie training.
Any other huge tips that you’ve learned when it comes to coaching or team management?
Make sure your newbies are engaged and trained well. My organization is very much experiencing growing pains and we’ve been struggling with managing all the new kids and making sure they learn the basics of VEX. Solid training really pays off later in the season.
I think this is a great response!
I am a HS V5RC coach and this will be my 4th year coaching.
For notebooks we used a digital notebook for the team, specifically the one provided by VEX. Like stated above this was great so kids could work on the same page at the same time and since it was a google doc we had no worries about someone leaving it at home or formatting something wrong. I also gave my kids their own personal notebook where they could research, sketch, brainstorm, etc and they seemed to really like it. The kids said they liked that they could just take it with them everywhere and it was light and easy to jot down a quick note or two and that it was easy to draw out ideas and then scan them into the digital notebooks. There were some kids who didn’t use the notebooks but the ones who did REALLY used them. We use the Scribbles That Matter notebooks because they take any pen or marker like a champ.
At my school I divide the students into two groups, those who want to compete and those who don’t. The competition kids have the option to build the herobot but often they just dive right into looking things up online, brainstorming and building. The non-competition kids I have build the herobot so they get the experience with robotics without the pressures of competition.
Last year we worked on and off during the summer. We thought this would be helpful but it just burned us out sooner. This year we will be starting to work in August with some light prep during July. Some local teams are starting scrimmages in August so we want to be prepared with at least a base.
I like the suggestion of the intro camps that the other post mentions. My school doesn’t have a direct feeder program from the middle school and we also don’t have a class dedicated to robotics (I am not a teacher at the school, I just coach.) My idea for an intro camp would be to build and run the freeze tag bots that are from VEX Camps. OR require students to build and code a herobot so they have experience.
I think that every year is different because the kids are different. What works for one group might not benefit another one. My first year I had a team of 12 students most of them were seniors. Then my second year I had one returning member and 11 new members, my third year we split the team and had 4 returning competition members and this coming year I will have 2 returning members and 3 new competition members. My one thing that I have found is getting parents on board and involved with schedules and keeping the competition students accountable is HUGE. While my students are very independent and decent planners at the end of the day they are kids. Having that additional adult support to make sure they are sticking to deadlines and reaching out where there are frustrations is very helpful.
