Team parts rules and home practice bots

VEX IQ General Discussion
1

Hello,

I am coaching my first year of Vex and I have a couple questions.

  • How do your team members practice driving if your teams robot requires more Vex IQ parts than each family has independently? Do you have your members make similar smaller robots, etc.

  • How do you handle parts purchased by the team?

    • Do they live at the team meeting location?
    • Are they allowed to be checked out to members or do they stay at the main team hub?
    • Do all parts rotate during off season?

  • How do you determine which tournaments have State/Regional qualification? I’ve checked the awards section of events posted on Vex Events but so far none of the tournaments have awards that show a qualification.

  • What are your requirements for participation on the team?

  • How do you find kids of equal ability when you are coaching young teams? (8-9y/o)

Thanks for any feedback!

2

Welcome to VEX!

  1. I would recommend having a rotating schedule of taking one robot used for competitions home because often the tuning can be different between robots and it’s hard to replicate an exact robot with all of its unique features.
  2. You should probably have a check-out system for parts purchased by the team, but that is just my opinion.
  3. I’m not sure.
  4. I would say having a role (or multiple) on the team and actively doing the role. There are usually multiple roles per person but it depends on how many people are on your team.

Good luck!

3

I’m not in vex iq, rather vex v5, but I still believe I can offer some insight.

I’m a commander for our jrotc robotics team, so I have some experience with this.

For the most part, parts live at the meeting location. If the location is in a public area (a park, etc), then find a responsible adult to take it to/from the location. However, if someone has an idea and they’d like to take parts home to work on it, I allow it, but they must explain their idea, and provide proof of concept (a cad model, etc). For younger kids this can be skipped, as long as they have parental consent.

For driving, if you can afford it then you can buy some cheap robots that the kids can take home and practice, as some practice with any robot is better than nothing. If you have a main driver, I’d let them take the main robot home and let them drive that to practice.

I require that all team members are actively participating. Last year we had an issue with kids who were just on their phones, and I fixed that this year. They must attend at least 75% of all practices if they don’t have an excuse. Excused absences don’t count, they’re a neutral number.

When trying to find equal ability, just have them be them and you’ll figure pretty quick what they like to do. If they go for the parts, they’re a builder. A controller, they’re a driver. A computer, they’re a coder, etc.

Hope this helped, and good luck this season!

4

Thanks so much really helpful!

5

welcome to vex iq!

it is illegal to have more than one robot, so i do not suggest each of them having a robot. i agree with @3383B , it’s a good idea to keep your one robot and work on it in shifts. my coach lets the team captains take home all of the field parts to use at home over winter break or other long breaks, so if you need to do that, that’s good.

we have shelves and racks of different parts. maybe put 1x_s in one box and 2x_s in another. keep your connector pins in walgreens pill bottles. it really helps, because ziploc bags will tear open and they will all leak out. this is coming from someone with experience! also, they should live at the team meeting place, and people can take home parts along with the robot. there are rolling thingys on amazon that can hold the robot and other parts.

(extra advice to save money: start by ordering the vex iq starter boxes, and if your team needs more parts, go order those extra parts.)

i think most tournaments qualify for state/regionals? if you are having trouble figuring out, contact the tournament’s curator.

kids should make it to at least half of the practices over a season. i do competitive soccer and varsity volleyball, yet i still find time to do robotics. if they don’t have any interest, they’ll quit. trust me.

most 8-9 year olds may not be interested. as someone with an eight year old sister, i know it’s hard to make them want to do something. it doesn’t matter how smart they are, there is many types of knowledge, many of which are good for vex robotics. if they keep showing no interest or not coming to practices, you may want to contact parents/guardians.

6

… at an event, or is there another rule ?