I am a new advisor for my school’s Vex IQ Club. After my first year, I am looking for pointers to make it the club better. My wife suggested to have a guideline/timeline that the students have to follow. This year it seemed like the teams were rushing at the end to finish their bots. Also, they did not keep up with they notebooks. I know this club is to be fun but I want the students to understand the process and give them a taste of the real world. Anyone have any pointers or tips to creating a guideline/timeline that when things are to be done by. Thank you all in advance.
I am going to assume your club is competing. One big note is nothing is perfect in really anything, but especially in Vex. Here is one thing to enhance your middle school robotics cub. I would recommend competing in as many events as possible. This can help the students learn more because they can collaborate with other teams. Also, from these competitions you can learn from other designs. For timing, you should make sure to have a full schedule for each team to make sure that team is prepared for their competitions and whatever else they plan. Our team has a weekly schedule we try to follow and it has enhanced our robotics team very much and this also made us learn time management. What you can do as a coach is to make sure to keep these students on their schedules and being consistent with both practices and meetups. Some ideas for a timeline is to start off with a plan meeting, where all of the teams just share their ideas amongst each other. After having one of those meetings, have them start to sort of draw or design their ideas, rather on paper or by explaining what they have. After that they should test. Testing is the most import step and if there is any step to follow it’s that one. Make sure the teams test before competing. My coach has been really consistent on helping us practice as much as we can and helping us find time to do that. These are some ways that you could implement into your robotics club in the future. The robotics club I’m in does most of these and have been really successful. Good luck and have fun!
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