This is our first year to have VEX Robots at our school. I have been teaching semester long robotics classes as a high school elective this school year with the goal of starting a team next year. Last semester’s class went well considering that it was a brand new class. This semester’s class was off to an even better start before the COVID-19 virus shut us down. Now we are shifting to online courses at our school and will probably finish out the school year this way. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I finish out this course with my students all stuck at home, unable to work with their partner, and the robots all stuck at school?
I would suggest having your roboteers learn CAD. Also, VEX Code VR is releasing soon. You might want to check that out:
Also if you can, a discord server for your class would be nice to discuss things. Microsoft teams is also a great tool as you can do video chats with your class (my school uses this).
Robotmesh Studio is a great tool. You can create an account and go into the studio. Then, you can create mimic projects with either Vex IQ or EDR. It’s super easy and there are plenty of tutorials to be found. There, you can CAD robots virtually and program them to perform actions or even to be controlled by a driver. It is really useful for remote and virtual learning and also for prototyping. https://www.robotmesh.com/studio
Here is the link.
Thank you both for your replies. I also found out that they are giving 90 day trials for free to Robot Virtual Worlds during the COVID-19 shut down. I’ve been looking at that. It’s well done but not up to V5 and has a pretty good learning curve for the short amount I have to get up to speed with it (all while shifting to online instruction for all my classes). Glad to hear other suggestions if anyone else has any.
I was using the Future Engineer software and really liked it. I thought it was only free until the end of June though. I will most likely be switching to VEXcode VR foe when we start school again. I will definitely miss the teacher dashboard that The Future Engineer software had though, I think I would be willing to pay for it if VEX was to offer something similar.
There is also RobotMesh Virtual Academy, which launched recently and looks like it has a similar feature set to the CoderZ platform.
(I am still able to access my CZ school account even though it’s no longer June - not sure if they’re still accepting new schools through the Future Engineer program though)
Thanks for the update. Future Engineer needs to update their site, then. I already use VEXcode VR, but was looking for additional resources for virtual teaching / learning for robotics. Any other ideas?