VEX IQ has been added to our school curriculum for Grades 7 to 10. I am currently preparing the semester plan and need to design 15 lessons for each grade level.
As I am new to robotics, I would greatly appreciate your guidance on how to structure the VEX IQ content across Grades 7–10 and how to break it down into a clear, progressive set of lessons for each grade.
Thank you in advance for your support.
Hi @Benila_Rose_Roselet! First of all, welcome to the Community! I’m delighted to hear that you’re bringing VEX IQ into your program. There are many ways that you could structure your lesson planning. There are a few resources that I wanted to share to help you get started.
- The Scope and Sequences on the teachiq.vex.com page are a great place to begin. These Google docs show you various implementations with either an engineering focus, competition focus, or coding focus. While these are written for a class that meets one period a day for 9 weeks, the sequence of STEM Labs/Activities is really the crux of the document. That can give you a way to look at different orders of units to see which feels right for your students.
- There is also a scope and sequence for using one bundle with multiple classes, that can give some insight into how to spread building activities out and when classes can be all working on the same unit.
- If your students are new to building with VEX IQ, I think it is also really helpful to start slowly and work your way up to a full STEM Lab. The scope and sequences all begin with some introductory activities, and here are some other resources you can use to help you get started:
- Space Adventure Activity Series - build a series of space-themed free-builds over the course of several Activities. You don’t have to complete all of the Activities in the Series, but using several of them is a great place to help students get comfortable with free building and thinking creatively with IQ pieces.
- Tallest Tower Challenge - this is a great introductory activity that you can easily turn into a classroom competition by making it a free-build as high as students can construct
- Sammy Rescue - this is a really fun activity to get creative with mechanisms with your kids! (I’ve done teacher workshops with this activity, and it’s always a blast)
- I really like to revisit some of these free-build challenges over time so students can improve their first attempt at a contraption once they learn more about things like gears or mechanization.
The other thing you can do, is begin with a STEM Lab like Team Freeze Tag (after some introductory building experiences). That will give you a ‘taste’ of building and driving a robot, iterating on a robot in a controlled way, and a little bit of coding (using a provided project). From there, you can then see which directions your students are most interested and go on to the next Activities or STEM Lab based on their interests.
The competition-style STEM Lab Units are meant to be longer-term engagements, and not like “one shot” activities to cover in a single class or two. So something like Team Freeze Tag could easily take you a few weeks to work all the way through, giving students ample time for collaborating, documenting, and discussing, alongside their practices and competitions. I’ve also worked with teachers who chose one or two units and built a whole semester out of them, for a kind of deeper dive.
I hope this is helpful to get you started I look forward to hearing more about what you and your students are doing and learning with IQ!
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