Today was another inspiring day at VEX Worlds! @Aimee_DeFoe and I watched matches, and talked with teams, coaches, and parents throughout the day. There were a few common threads that stood out for me in these conversations that I thought would be good to share with the Community.
Coach’s Mindset - One thing that stood out to me as we’ve been speaking with coaches and mentors, is how comfortable they are with students being the drivers of learning on their teams. Over and over we heard coaches say things like “My kids look up whatever they need”, or “They know way more than I do about coding”, or “I got them started, and they really took it from there”. Often as teachers, we can feel pressure to have all the answers even before we begin teaching something, but these coaches not only are comfortable with their own limitations, they embrace the fact that the whole goal of the team is essentially, for their students to grow and learn (potentially beyond their coach’s breadth of knowledge) in order to succeed.
One coach phrased it beautifully, saying “I don’t have to be good at it for my kids to learn from it.” We talked about how he initially was put into the coach role by an administrator, but quickly realized that things did not have to be perfect to be valuable to his students. Another coach talked about how being freed from having to be ‘all knowing’ enabled him to focus more on the soft skills or life skills with his team - things like communication, problem solving, and finding answers to things you want to learn more about.
Team Mindset - This openness of the coaches also seemed to translate directly to their students. Something that struck me throughout my conversations with teams was how open minded and flexible they were in their thinking. Not just about their robot designs or strategy, there’s a LOT of flexibility there, but that they seemed to have developed a disposition that learning is just as important (if not more) as winning. While all of the teams at Worlds have had success in order to get here, each one could also talk about things that were unsuccessful for them during the season. How they started wanting to build a descoring robot, but realized that wasn’t as effective as they thought it would be, or how they spent weeks on an elevation mechanism, but got knocked over in the competition and couldn’t use it, or how they started off wanting to build a catapult shooting robot, but shifted to a faster robot with an intake. In each of these stories, teams talked about how they learned from seeing other teams ideas, from losing at competitions, and from sharing openly with their VEX community in order to continue learning and iterating.
Along with this, teams also talk about how much time and energy they spend on their team. The commitment is significant - but what struck me the most, is that even with spending a lot of time and energy on something, if it didn’t work the way they wanted it to, it was ok. Even if teams lost a match, broke their robot, or got disqualified, there didn’t seem to be a major blow to their confidence or their sense of purpose as a team. The message from the students seems to be that the goal is continuous learning - which can be so much more powerful than simply winning a game. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings!
