Hi everyone!
I’m a brand new VEX V5 Robotics teacher from Summit High School in Summit, NJ. Students return for their first day on Tuesday, September 8th, and I’m working on getting ready for that first day/week.
I will be following the V5 Curriculum using the 42 week course outline (which combines V5 and EXP STEM Labs). I plan on starting with the Week 1 Lab, Robo Rally.
I would love any/all advice on what other teachers do for their first day/week: do you jump right into building the Speedbot? Or do you go through the various parts of the robot with your students?
I appreciate any/all replies to this post, as I am a department to myself (as I’m sure many others are as well!).
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Hi John, welcome to the community. Starting at Week 1 with Robo Rally is the right call, so I’d stay with that plan.
On your question, build first. Don’t front-load a parts tour. The Speedbot build is the parts tour, just with the learning happening in their hands instead of on a screen. Now, you can spend a bit of time scaffolding, in case students struggle with following build instructions and spatial reasoning. For example, before the full build, hand each group one or two steps from the instructions and have them find the pieces, build just that step, and compare it to the picture. Five minutes. That shows you who reads the diagrams easily and who’s going to need a hand before you’re twenty steps in. It also gives you something to point back to when a group gets stuck: “You did this on Tuesday, what’s different here?”
Two other things I’d give your first week to.
Team roles and routines. Decide now how students will work in groups (builder, programmer, recorder, whatever fits your class) and rotate them early. That structure is what keeps a room of new builders from turning into three kids watching one kid.
Normalizing failure out loud. The first program that doesn’t work is the most important moment of your first week. If students see you treat it as the start of the process rather than a mistake, you’ve set the culture for the whole year. The engineering notebook is where that shows up. Have them write down what didn’t work before they fix it.
You’re a department of one (i was one also), but you aren’t alone. This PLC is the hallway conversation. Post what happened after day one and people here will jump in.
Good luck on the 8th and keep us updated!
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Thank you Jason, that is extremely helpful. I will definitely post here after the first day or so how things went.
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Ok, so far, things are going really well. Just about all groups are working diligently on building the robot right now.
Question: What are some examples of what a typical “good” entry in an Engineering Notebook might look like? Has this question already been posted? If not, do you have any you wouldn’t mind sharing here?
I dont have a ton of examples, but there is a good one in here that @Aimee_DeFoe shared in one of her latest Insights articles! Engineering Notebooks as a Formative Assessment Tool | VEX Professional Development Plus
I think the new Engineering Notebook Rubric that is used for the V5 and IQ Competitions would potentially be a good place to start so students can see the building blocks of what would make an exemplary notebook. Link to that rubric and an explanation of it is in this article: https://library.globalrobotics.org/hc/en-us/articles/51134310278804-Engineering-Notebook-Rubrics
It gives concrete things to think about like ensuring their notebook is easily able to be referenced as well as pieces like including both qualitative and quantitative data when doing tests.
In my experience, students get really stuck on what one perfect entry looks like and they miss how each entry works with the ones around it to build the best notebook for them. I think you could potentially frame this as good habits to start with and slowly incorporate them as you do different lessons! Maybe for Robo Rally you focus on regular entries and keeping them organized, but then for another STEM Lab you have students focus on documenting the brainstorming parts of the rubric. Then each piece can build to some cool, thorough documenting.
Here is also a video from this year’s VEX Educator’s conference on using the engineering notebook: Design.Code.Reflect: Integrating Writing in STEM Learning | VEX Professional Development Plus
@Tina_Dietrich is active in our community so you can follow up with any questions.
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