VEX IQ Session 7

Before You Begin This Session

Congratulations! You got your team through their first VEX IQ Robotics Competition event! The goal of this session is to celebrate that accomplishment, and guide your team to reflect on their experience to get ready for their next event. No matter what the outcome on the leaderboard was, competing in and of itself is a success. This session is your opportunity, as coach, to make sure that students recognize their successes, and see any perceived failures as opportunities to learn.

In this session, students will complete a choice board activity (individually or in small groups) to share their reflections and thoughts from the competition. Then, you will bring the whole team together to share what they created, and talk about how they want to apply their learning from the competition moving forward. This was just their first competition - how can they build on that experience to make the next competition go even better? You may want to: 

• Have the date of the next competition and details about the event ready to share. 
• Post students' choice board creations on a bulletin board or in your school to share students' learning with others.
• Guide students to choose which session of this unit they want to to return to next to improve their strategy or robot moving forward.

Encourage your team to celebrate their learning! Regardless of how their matches played out, or if they won awards or not, your team learned valuable lessons from their competition experience. Help students to think more broadly about what success means, and keep the reflection discussion positive.

The goal of this activity is to give students a creative way to reflect on their competition day experience. Everyone is answering the same questions, but doing it in a way that works best for them. You can have students complete the activity individually, with their drive team partner, or in a small group.

As students are working, ask the following questions to help them reflect and communicate their ideas. 

• To think about what went well, ask: 
  • What was your favorite part of the event?
  • What was a pleasant surprise? 
  • What positive experiences or interactions did you have throughout the day?
• To think about what was learned from another team, ask: 
  • What is something you learned from your alliance partners?
  • What did you learn from watching other teams compete?
  • What is something you learned about robot design from seeing other robots?

Refer to the Student-Centered Policy for more details about the coach/mentor's role during team reflection. Use the questions above to help students think it through — the reflections and the ideas that come out of them should be the students' own.

• Several of the choice board options ask students what they learned from watching other teams. Remind students that when they bring an outside idea onto their own robot, the policy's Ownership Check applies:
  • Adapt. Did we change it to fit our own robot and purpose, instead of dropping it in unchanged?
  • Test. Did we put it to work on our robot, learn from how it performed, and improve it?
  • Understand. Do we know what the idea does and why it works, not just that it works?
  • Credit. Did we name the source?
• Encourage students to record where each idea came from as they reflect, even if they are not sure they will use it yet. Naming the source is easiest now, while they still remember which team or robot they saw it on.

Give students time to complete their reflection in a meaningful way. Don't let students rush through this activity - encourage them to take the time to think more deeply about the day as a whole, and help them to celebrate all of the ways in which their team found success!

Help students to use the resources in this session to help them as they continue with their season. You can return to any of the previous sessions or activities to guide the team through further iterations and improvements. 

Revisit the Student-Friendly Engineering Notebook Rubric with students as they document their reflection.

• Focus on the 'Did we try and learn again? – Reflection and Iteration' section. This session generates the kind of evidence those rows describe, so students can look at what they just wrote and see how it compares to the rubric.
• Have a discussion comparing the levels within these rows: what actually separates an exemplary entry from a proficient one, or a developing one from beginning. Point out that the top level of 'Thinking about how it is going' is not just that the team reflected, but that what they learned from reflecting changed what they did next. Recording ideas for improvement now, and then acting on them before the next competition, is what makes that visible.
• Students can also use the full rubric to self-assess their whole notebook and set goals for their next competition.

The IQ Section of the VEX Library can help you and your team get ready for the next competition. Look for articles and information about the mechanical and coding aspects of the VEX IQ system.

Looking to do more at competition? Try incorporating Robot Skills or Online Challenges. 

• Learn about Driving and Autonomous Coding Skills in the Robot Skills Challenge section of the Level Up game manual.
  • Use the VEXcode API Reference to learn about all of the commands in the VEXcode IQ Toolbox.

If you have reached the end of your season, and are looking for ways to capitalize on students' excitement around robotics and STEM learning, these resources can help you explore further:

• teachiq.vex.com can help you build your coaching and teaching skills with IQ, and show how you can incorporate VEX IQ STEM Labs and Activities with your team.
• VEXcode VR resources can support students who want to level up their coding skills.

Most importantly, have fun with your team and enjoy being a part of their STEM learning journey!