I had a wonderful talk with Sophie last week - we started off talking about ways to iterate on the V5 pre-built claw to enable it to pick up different sizes/shapes of objects. But as we were talking, much of our conversation unfolded into how to scaffold engineering challenges, and use questions and conversations to draw out students’ thinking about engineering design and concepts. It was a great talk about using questions to guide student discussion, and ways to slow down a challenge to support students thinking more deeply about the structure/mechanism they are working with.
We talked about using the Advanced Training Bot build for the Competition Kit as a jumping off point for exploring the construction of claws, and having a base to build onto for a claw challenge.
After our conversation, I remembered the engineering and coding conversations VEX Library articles that have great questions to use to help get in the habit of facilitating conversational learning and student discussions. Here are the links:
I can’t wait to hear how curriculum planning continues to go for Sophie, and I look forward to chatting more throughout the process!
