The 23/24 Student Advisory Board wrapped up for the year in May with a review of the 2024 VEX Robotics World Championship and the VEX Robotics season. This year’s SAB composed of 13 members:
• Seven (7) males and six (6) females
• Three Seniors; the rest are 10th and 11th graders (US terminology)
• From Australia, Canada, UK, and the US (10 states)
• Student representation from city, suburban and rural teams
• Equal representation from public school and private / club teams
• Participation in VEX Robotics spanned from 2nd year to 7th. The mean was 4 years
• One SAB member participates in JROTC and SkillsUSA
• Primary Roles of SAB members on their team included designer / builder, programmer, notebook and team captain
A record number of 11 SAB students attended VEX Worlds this past year. They were vital in meeting with RECF and VEX Robotics partners, giving tours as Student Ambassadors. One SAB member, Diana, even gave the opening remarks at the VEX IQ World Championship Opening Ceremony! She did an amazing job!
The SAB meets monthly: I am the “sponsor” of the SAB and Carol manages the SAB program. We jointly run the monthly meetings. We have topics we discuss at each meeting and I often assign “homework” for the SAB to research a specific topic (for example, how can RECF better communicate with teams).
Many of the changes the SAB proposes take time to implement. For example, the RECF has received a lot of requests from coaches to provide guidance to give more students an opportunity by increasing team size. I asked the SAB to define additional potential roles on a VEX team and they had great input. We will provide a Library article on the roles they suggested, and this may even lead to new award criteria and / or online challenges.
However, there are also items that the SAB provided input on that the RECF utilized during the season. Some examples:
The GDC reviewed potential changes for the hang for Over Under. The SAB gave very reasonable feedback that helped define the game manual update for the robot hang (removing the cap).
The SAB also strongly advocated that the RECF needed to improve communications with the student community because in many cases, the students don’t see the communications (especially the email newsletter) that the RECF sends to coaches. The SAB recommended a RECF VEX Robotics Discord channel for student communications. The RECF has no intention of monitoring or facilitating a Discord channel (for many reasons but especially because the VEX Forum already exists). As a compromise, the RECF is creating a Discord channel just for announcements that we currently communicate in the email newsletter.
Over the past two years, the SAB has also provided a lot of great feedback on judging. In fact, the changes to the Design Award to reward innovation and creativity came from the SAB. Originally, we discussed elevating these awards and the SAB strongly advocated that the Design Award needed to be the second highest judge award and that we needed to include innovation as part of the judging criteria. The SAB has also provided valuable insight on the judging process including transparency, notebooks and even judging feedback.
Back in 2018, the students pushed to have a voice and we created the Student Advisory Board as a result. The students on the SAB have been a pleasure to work with and have made numerous contributions to the program since then.
Thanks,
Dan Mantz
CEO – REC Foundation