I am relatively new to teaching Robotics and need some advice on how to grade things class. This is my first year teaching high school robotics and also being the coach of VRC teams. I used to teach middle school where we didn’t have the space for a team to practice. We had VEX GO kits, so I used the STEM labs for lessons in class. Before I taught Robotics, I taught Math, which of course has assignments every day and a very structured curriculum.
The program I’m at now is has been around for a while, so I have older students that really know what they are doing and don’t need much direction from me. So for my advanced kids, I’ve mostly just been leaving them to their work as they get ready for competitions. Our school hosts a tournament every year and I’m planning on having all my advanced students either participate as part of a team or help in some other way during the event. I’ve asked the students and apparently the last Robotics teacher graded them mostly on just participation. Since I am very unexperienced with grading or teaching this way, I was wondering if anyone had advice on how to grade for participation. If I just had a rubric of requirements for the tournament we’re hosting, that would be great. Thanks
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Hi @Leo_Fogel! Great question 
I’m also a former math teacher!
There are many answers to this question depending on what you want the outcome to be for your students, so let me break it down piece by piece.
V5 STEM Lab Rubrics
We have V5 rubrics intended to be used with our V5 STEM Labs. These rubrics include:
- Build rubric
- Collaboration rubric
- Engineering Notebook rubric (both individual and team assessments)
- Programming rubric
- Pseudocode rubric
All of the above rubrics are combined in this google doc. You can make a copy and edit it for the needs of your students. Please keep in mind these rubrics are intended for classroom use and are not VRC Competition rubrics. However, they do allow for assessment of many different kinds of skills that students can gain practice with.
VRC Rubrics
For the rubrics used in actual competition, you can check out the resources from the REC. Here are a few of the resources:
You can see a full list of VRC resources from the REC Library.
EXP Student Self-Assessment
In our EXP STEM Labs, which can be done with V5 hardware, we focus on student self-assessment and provide rubrics for that.
We cover this in our Getting Started Teaching video, part of each EXP STEM Lab’s Teacher Portal.
Student self-assessment fosters a constructive and inclusive learning culture, aligns assessment with learning, and prepares students for real-world scenarios.
This is built into every EXP STEM Lab.
For more information on student self-assessment and how we use it in our STEM Labs, you can view this article.
Here is an example of a Debrief Conversation Rubric from the Robot Soccer EXP STEM Lab, and this article covers how to have effective debrief conversations with students.
I know this is a lot of information, so if you’d like me to expand on any of these topics, I’d be more than happy to
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