Hey there! I’m making a VEX EDR Cortex tutorial series with a friend who’s active on our university team ( I’m a senior in the Mechatronics program at KSU ). It’s an independent project we’re doing to help people who are new to the platform. We plan to make more and would love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!
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Any reason you chose Cortex over V5?
Since the Cortex was replaced by V5, you should do your project on the V5.
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@93870A and @Foster your totally right, but we’re working with what the university has on hand right now. They are potentially looking to upgrade and we’re stoked to make more videos if and when they do. That’s a big reason why we’re looking for feedback, I’m pretty new to both video and Vex and want to do a great job on the V5 videos.
I have watched the videos and I think that the content is pretty good. You have done a good job explaining the mechanical things in detail without watering it down too much. However, you might want to put the audio on both the right and left channels for us stereo bois because it gave me quite a shock when the voice was only on the left in the second video.
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lol I can’t believe I cut the audio in mono on one side, I’m such a newb. @Cadaver_42 thanks for the feedback
I really like the idea of your videos, but the important question would be: who is your target audience?
If it is young students who are not familiar with VEX yet, then I feel there are some portions of the video that are a bit too heavy on the theory and might be not as easy for the students to follow. For example, when you talk about gear ratios at 4:30, I would love to see a gearbox with gears that you spin by hand and later a long geartrain that would illustrate how chain is better to transmit power over the longer distances.
On the other hand, if the target audience is older students who are experienced with competing with VEX, then they may find some examples not applicable to VRC. For example, you say that “most of the times you want to drive your traction wheels and let omni wheels to spin freely” at 3:10:
However, that choice depends on the surface on which you intend to drive your robot.
On the foam tiles for VRC fields omni wheels offer the best traction and most teams use chassis with four powered omni wheels.
Also, you may want to include some slides with mechanism sketches or diagrams, in addition to narration, to make material easy to understand both for visual and auditory learners.
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At our university we have an Introduction to Mechatronics class that mainly serves freshman and early transfer students. The class has a lab component where the students first build a clawbot before going on to design and build their own robots for a competition at the end of the semester. The competition is is open to the public and is both the students’ final exam and an opportunity for K-12 to get exposure to robotics. Our primary audience is the group of students in this class.
I’ll forward your comments about the driven vs free omni wheels onto Tim.
You’re right about including more diagrams and real life examples (like the gear box). I’m a visual learner and can appreciate that sentiment . We did these videos using outline and speaking off the cuff. The close ups we had we’re mostly improvised/naturally came up. I think planning those kind of shots into the video next time would go a long way.
@technik3k this is really helpful, thank you for taking the time to leave such thoughtful comments.
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