Session 3: Driving Your Robot

Before You Begin Your Session

This session is designed to help your students confidently drive the Hero Bot and begin collecting data in their engineering notebooks. They will test different driver configurations and record their findings, establishing a data collection routine that can be built upon throughout the season.

By the end of the session, students will use their collected data to form drive team partnerships, which they can carry into future sessions or competitions.

Feel free to move through this session at your own pace—the structure and resources are here to guide you, not constrain you.

Have your Hero Bot and V5RC Competition Field ready for the session before you begin. You will need the following: 

• A V5RC Competition Field and Push Back Game Elements: 
  • First, build your competition Field perimeter using the links on this page. 
  • Then assemble this season’s V5RC Competition Field using these build instructions. 
• A Hero Bot (built in the previous session).
• Charged controller and batteries.
• 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.

The engineering notebook is a key tool for documenting your team’s design process, decisions, and reflections. It captures the team’s progress throughout the season and is an important factor in competition awards, such as the Excellence Award.

In this session, student groups will test each of the controller configurations and collect data on their performance. While a sample table is provided on the task card, students should record their findings in the team’s engineering notebook.

As students work in pairs, consider having one student drive while the other times the activity and records the data. This division of roles promotes collaboration and efficient data collection.

• To learn more about ways to help students get in the habit of notebooking, read this article.
• To learn more about the engineering notebook as a learning tool, read this article.

The goal of this activity is to get students comfortable driving the Hero Bot, while also practicing data collection. By the end of the session, students will use their notebooks to help them make data-based decisions about drive team partners that could work best together based on each student’s preferred driver configuration. 

You can remove all of the Blocks on the Field for this activity. If students are struggling to navigate the Field with extra obstacles, remove any additional elements to create a simpler environment while they build confidence with driving.

Make sure that students are taking turns driving and timing, and that all students are recording data in the engineering notebook. Encourage students to pay attention to the drivers to note strategies, ask questions, and think about adjustments they might make on their next turn. Prompt students to discuss what worked well and how they could improve their time or efficiency, and to make note of these ideas in their data collection.

If your students are struggling to make decisions about drive teams, or using their data to support their thinking, check out this collaborative decision-making video to support students in using data to guide their choices. It offers practical strategies and examples you can share with learners who need extra help interpreting results and making team-based decisions. 

You can also review this article for ways to support a positive team culture throughout your season.