I’m new to robotics, and it looks like VEX ERD is a good system for high school students but maybe not for student with no exposure to robotics . I’m teaching grades 9-12 robotics in a large, split class for the first time. We have enough money to buy one type of kit and I was wondering whether you would be opting for IQ or EDR, for a high school audience in this circumstance. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
Thank you.
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EDR may not be the best thing to start on if they have no experience with any robotics however if the students end up enjoying it and want to move to competing at competitions as a registered team they cannot afaik do so in IQ while in HS.
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The robotics class at my school uses edr and there are not robotics classes at the junior high, they do well in the class but it does take a bit to learn it, I would recommend having them build a robot from a kit like a clawbot before designing their own stuff.
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It depends on what you are trying to do and the amount of time you have to do it.
if you are meeting once a week and have a variety of lessons around the robot that will cause students to build many robots then IQ is the way to go.
If you meet more than one time a week and the projects are adding on then EDR.
A tangent factor is cost. If you have $X and Y roboteers, you want to be in a place that just 2 or 3 students share a robot. With the cost of EDR ~2.8 times the cost of VEXIQ then using IQ may be your direction.
More than a few school districts in Delmarva use VEXIQ at the high school level.
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To add on to what Foster has said, VexIQ is fully capable of teaching all robotics concepts and allows for the work to be done faster and more iterations in a set amount of time. The only real drawback is that HS students, mostly, can not compete in VexIQ. If this is for classroom only, I think VExIQ is a great solution for beginning and even intermediate roboteers.
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(I’ve combined the duplicated threads.)
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Looking at mechanics (especially things like gear ratios and compound gearing) and programming, the IQ platform is great, especially considering the cost. But also, outside of competitive robotics, being able to build models quickly has the EDR system beat.
You have to get past the “toy” aspect of IQ, but just look at http://vexiq.dreier-privat.de/ for example, and build a couple examples of the plotter, 3d printer, or graffiti bot, to see the versatility of the programming system beyond building IQ robots. For the same budget, you can get a bunch more “brains” out to the students.
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