My teacher gave all the seniors this assignment to test next years students. We have some ideas any help is appreciated. Please post Questions below thanks.
When you say test, do you mean on the Starstruck’s manual? If so, you can ask about the hang bonus, scoring, auton, and general rules. If that is not what you are testing them on, could you please clarify?
Not game manual but more along the lines of what to know about building and designing.
Perseverance is key in robotics. It’s not a place for the easily dissuaded or quit easily. Any way to get to that or describe experiences where you tired, failed, changed something, and persevered.
Gauge experience and comfort with tools. Have they ever used a saw before? Do they know what “righty tighty” means?
Ask why do you think you need to wear safety glasses.
What subsystems would go into a Vex robot? How would you go about designing each subsystem?
So things like definition is a pic. like 1b 2e 3a 4d 5c
This might not be the best idea because it could turn off students from joining if they feel overwhelmed or if they feel “stupid” about what they’re doing. Maybe ask the Seniors to take a few students and just let them think and use their hands for a day while seniors provide subtle tips and answer questions throughout the session. What my school does is we each try to take a freshmen and make a project for them. For example, I plan on taking a few freshmen and teaching the HTML, CSS, and Javascript to let them continue building our website.
I’m not sure testing is such a good idea.
Students can tend to fit into niches in Vex Robotics that can be helpful to the team in the long run. The best way to go about it, I think, would not be a test-style system, but to use the current people to assist the new people in their understanding. There should be no reason that a team has entirely new members every single year, so with old members still around, they should be able to learn in no time.
Students should have assistance finding their niches, and being the ones with control over their niches, because it will keep them engaged and allow a team to have various backups for anyone who can’t make a competition, or a practice, or a meet, or even a class.
I think you should just let them build something to complete a easy task (such as a marshmallow catapult) and see what each one of them does and analyse how they think.
Hook them up with a heart rate monitor and then ask them to place their cellphone out of reach and tell them they can’t play Xbox more than 6 hours a day. If their heart rate suddenly jumps above 210 beats per minute, then you know you might have a challenge ahead of you.
Haha, my old robotics mentor should do this, he has to deal with to many jumpy strange children that he may have accidentally let slip into the club.
This…
The only test you need. For anything in life.
ask them logical questions about how to solve problems, and ask why they gave that answer. eg. how do you launch a potato? answer, a catapult. why do you think a catapult? because … and so on.
Then, you see what they know, their work ethic, and a lot that a knowledge test or a building competition won’t solve, because some kids might have great ideas, but not yet know how to build it since they are new
I agree, you dont want kids feeling left out or dumb, otherwise they will probably quit, just simple things like logic problems above should be sufficient.
Our robotics club started the year off with about 50 students. About 30 of them stayed until the last day. Rather then test them, ask them why they are at robotics. If they are there for any other reason than a passion for robotics, let your supervisor know.
Or send them a google forms forum asking them why they decided to do robotics, and than it instantly goes to a spreadsheet with their names and than your done, add a few random questions like the potato launcher then sort them, without telling them, to the kids who may need more help than others, that is what I would do.
Just to clarify that Vex is a class at my school so when I said that the mentor was giving a test it is because this is an honors course and students have committed to the challenge. Also I am loving all the ideas and will definitely pass them on to my mentor.
I would ask drive/gear train questions. Give them the constraints: gear sizes, torque/rpm values at the 3 internal gearing settings, number of motors they can use. They can use any combination of them. Then ask a problem that requires a certain speed at a given torque. They must design a gear train that will satisfy the requirement. This is tricky with VEX because we are limited to the power of the 393 motor. The gear ratios are set intervals so they will either be over or under, but somewhere close. You can also have them factor in a 20% increase for friction loss or something of that nature. You could make it an assignment where they must create a matrix in sheets or excel to assist in their calculations. You could require custom functions be written in the spreadsheet that will calculate torque given a GR and Motor class.