VIQRC Session 5

Before You Begin This Session

This session will guide your team through a process for making improvements to their Hero Bot, to help it perform better in the competition. In the previous sessions, students followed a process to help them make data-based decisions about driving and scoring. In this session, they will use collaborative, data-based decision making to choose which wheels to use on Huey, as a way of practicing the process of making iterative improvements to a robot. 

The process used in this session can be used for future robot improvements. You can repeat the activities in this session at any point to help students learn about different things they can change on their robot. Helping students to slow down and think about small changes they can make and why can help make iteration less daunting for you and your team. Changing the wheels is just one example to get them started.

Throughout this session, your role as coach will be to help guide them through this process, including reminding them about good documentation practices like recording ideas, sketches, reasoning, and data about robot design changes. You will also help the team to make collaborative decisions when they are improving the robot's design.

Have your materials ready for the session before you begin. You will need the following:

• A built Hero Bot
• Charged controller and batteries
• A built VIQRC Mix & Match Competition Field
• Your VEX IQ Competition Kit 
• An engineering notebook

Review strategies for implementing this STEM Lab with your team.

• Use the Implementing a Competition 101 STEM Lab article to help you prepare and facilitate this session.
• Read the Making Competition 101 STEM Labs Work For All Students article for ways to adapt, or differentiate, session content to meet varying student needs.
• Review the considerations in the Cultivating a Positive Team Culture article to support your teams' growing collaboration skills.

In this session, students will follow a process for making improvements to their robot. They will practice using this process by testing and recording data about the various wheels in the IQ Competition Kit, to determine the best wheels to use with the strategy they created in Session 4.

Changing the wheels is a straightforward way to ease students into making incremental changes to their robot. In the activity, they will use the wheel change as a way to practice the process outlined in the video. To learn more about the wheels themselves:

• Use this article to learn more about the different types of IQ Wheels. 
• You can also refer to this lesson summary from the Changing the Wheels lesson in the Team Freeze Tag STEM Lab.

The following guiding questions may be useful as students are testing, as they can help focus attention on the most important information, without actively influencing students to make a certain choice:

• Which wheels do you think will perform best, and why?
• How will you know how well your wheels are working?
• What data do you think it is important to record in your engineering notebook?
• How do the wheels work with the strategy you created in session 4?

This team interview showcases a team's iteration throughout an entire season. Share this video with your team to hear directly from students how they improved their robot with data-based decisions. 

The process used in this session can be repeated to make additional improvements to the robot over the course of the season. The following suggestions will help to make modifying the robot a smooth process:

• Remind students to document the way the robot is built before making any changes. Students can take photos or sketch the robot in detail. This ensures that they are able to put the robot back to its pre-modified state if they find their suggested change is not effective.
• Encourage students to make small, incremental changes, and to change only one thing at a time. Changing multiple things on the robot at one time will cause confusion about the results produced with each change.
• Students may find their chosen wheel change (or any other future modification) doesn't actually help the robot's performance, and that is ok! Each improvement, whether or not it works as anticipated, is an opportunity to learn something about the engineering of the robot that they can use to inform future improvements!
• You may need to guide students to choose a test for that change that will yield the data they need to make a decision. Remind them that their test needs to focus on the part of the robot they are changing!
• The Mechanical section of the VEX Library may be helpful to you and to students as they work through their future design ideas. You can also have students browse the VEX store to see if any additional parts will help them to improve their robot.

For additional guidance on facilitating productive, student-centered engineering conversations—including question ideas and discussion prompts—read this article. You can also use the PD+ Community to support you and your team in thinking about robot design and build iterations. Threads like this one, highlight how there are many ways to solve a challenge. While this shows VEX GO, the same applies for IQ. You can read for inspiration, or post questions to get input and ideas from others in the community at any time.