Competition with a Purpose!
Teacher Tips
- For further research on the VEX IQ robot competition Squared Away, click here.
- For more research on VEX competitions visit this competition.vex.com.
- Encourage students to see the link between the Italy’s Trash Robot and purposeful coding for a task.
Speed and Control
Each year, students can design and build a robot to play against other teams in a game-based engineering challenge, the VEX IQ Robotics Competition (VIQRC). Tournaments are held year-round at the regional, state, and national levels leading to the VEX Robotics World Championship each year.
The VEX IQ Robotics Competition (VIQRC) is played on a 4’x8’ rectangular field. Teams program their robots to move around the field grabbing, tossing, and placing game pieces in scoring zones in order to earn the most points.
In the 2019-2020 challenge entitled Squared Away, teams have to move balls in the squares as well as on top of the squares. Like Italy’s Trash Robot, the driver will purposefully move and teams will work together to collect and move the squares into the correct color space at the corners of the board.
Here are some typical behaviors for a VEX Robot:
- Moving forward and backward
- Turning left and right
- Grabbing a game object
- Precisely placing a game object
- Sorting between different game objects
- Throwing or launching a game object
There are two types of challenges the teams will tackle. In the Robot Skills Challenge, teams try to score as many points as possible with their robotic build in two types of matches. Driving Skills matches are entirely driver controlled and Autonomous Coding Skills matches are autonomous with limited student interaction. The second type of challenge is the Teamwork Challenge, in which two robots compete in the challenge as an alliance in 60 second long matches, working together to score the most points.
VIQRC gives students the opportunity to:
- Demonstrate their driving and programming skills.
- Work together as a team to solve problems.
- Meet new people from their community, state, and even other countries.
- Have fun!
Teacher Tips
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Scaffolding
Have students start with simple tasks first and then combine those tasks into more advanced autonomous programs. Remember that teams can reset their robots as many times as they want during the Autonomous Coding Skills.
Extend Your Learning
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Let's Start Planning Like a Team!
Watch the video introducing the current challenge at competition.vex.com.
Challenge students to work in small groups to brainstorm a list of behaviors that a team's robot would need in order to solve this year's challenge.
Students should share their ideas with the rest of the class and then combine the lists together into a master list. This student created list can be used by the teacher for planning purposes when choosing additional VEX STEM labs to complete.
After sharing their list of behaviors, students can be further prepared for competitions by asking the groups to organize the following in their engineering notebooks:
- Sketch the game field and map out routes the robot should follow in order to score points.
- Explain in plain language each behavior the robot needs to carry out (this is known as pseudocode).