I just had a lovely chat with a middle school educator who expanded the Robotics class from 1 class to 2 from first semester to second. She was looking for ways to navigate that with only one classroom bundle. We started off with a Scope & Sequence from teachexp.vex.com designd for just this situation!
The Teaching Multiple Classes with 1 Classroom Bundle Scope and Sequence opened her eyes to having all classes participate in the building process - and just breaking the build down into steps that each class would complete together. Once the robots are built, then she’s free to teach the same STEM Lab across both groups. Luckily, she’s already got many Printable Parts Rulers in her classroom, so that resource was familiar! Since she’s working with middle schoolers who have never built before, I also recommended building as a whole class guided experience, where everyone is building the same step at the same time. It might take longer, but it’ll help her keep track of what’s going on across groups and make it easier to “share” kits between classes.
She’d already taught Team Freeze Tag in the first semester, so we talked about using that again as a starting point with the BaseBots. Then we talked about a few directions she could take from there like,
- Exploring other labs like Castle Crasher or Robot Soccer, depending on if she wanted more of a coding exploration or building exploration.
- Using VEXcode VR to supplement what she was doing with physical robots when it comes to coding.
- Using the CS Level 1 Blocks course for help with teaching coding - and as a jumping off point for doing things in VR then with physical robots
She asked about exploring different kinds of manipulators (beyond just the Clawbot), like passive manipulators, and if she could challenge students to design their own. We talked about using passive manipulators as an option for this, or adapting something like theIQ Simple Clawbotfor EXP.
All in all, it was a great conversation to kick off 2026!
