Thank you to everyone who stuck it out in this workshop, through not one but TWO tornado warnings! We didn’t let the weather dampen our spirit or enthusiasm for teaching and learning with VEX 123!
I had so much fun coming up with unique hands-on activities to bring to this workshop, and I’m happy to share them in their workshop form with you. The theme of these activities was inspired by a much loved game from my childhood, involving a covered wagon that travels along a trail to Oregon 
We had one activity for Touch button coding, one with the Coder and Coder cards, and then completed the final activity with VEXcode 123. To summarize:
- Touch - code the robot to navigate around the general store to shop for supplies for your journey.
- Coder and Coder cards - turn your robot into a covered wagon with the Art Ring and craft supplies, then code it to nagivate across the river to safety on the other side. We did this first over “open-water”, and then added sensors to our projects to navigate around a floating log obstacle!
- VEXcode 123 - set up your wagon to navigate around the forest and “catch” red rabbits, blue deer, or a green bear to feed your group along the way. There were many ways to solve this open-ended challenge!
It was a joy to see participants getting just as excited as I was to participate and solve each of the coding challenges, and we learned many things along the way together! Here is a PDF of the slides that I used in the workshop, in case you would like to use this as inspiration with your own students.
123_ Three Ways to Code (Oregon Trail Edition).pdf (3.1 MB)
Here is a PDF of the field elements that we used (that were not construction paper
) that you can use, and have students color-in as you test out these activities for yourselves! Please let us know how it goes if your students head out on the trail!
