Session 5

Before You Begin This Session

This session will guide your team through making iterative improvements to their first robot design. In the previous sessions, students followed a process to help them make data-based decisions about driving and scoring. In this session, they will practice collaborative, data-based decision making to make incremental improvements to their robot.

Throughout this session, your role as coach will be to help remind students about good documentation practices like recording ideas, sketches, reasoning, and data about robot design changes. You will also help facilitate the team's collaborative process around making changes to the robot.

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

• A built Hero Bot.
• Charged controller and batteries.
• A built V5RC Push Back Competition Field.
• Spare VEX V5 Tools and Parts.
• 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 make collaborative decisions about a change they want to make to their robot. They will need to document their ideas for changes, and the reasoning behind them in their engineering notebook, then use that documentation to come to consensus as a team. They will also use the notebook to collect data about how the changes they make affect the robot's performance, so they can make data-based decisions on their robot's design.

Your team may also need guidance on the following:

• Moving through a collaborative decision making process.
• Making small, incremental changes, rather than large, overwhelming ones.
• Choosing a task to test the effectiveness of changes.

The guiding questions below can help you to facilitate their process as they improve their robot without solving their problems for them directly.

• What is the idea that you want to improve, and why?
• Why do you think your improvement will be effective? 
• How will you test your improvement to see if it is helpful?
• How does this improvement work with the strategy you created in session 4?
• What other improvements can you think of? 

Making improvements to the robot is an ongoing and iterative process. Students may find that their idea for improvement doesn't actually help the robot's performance, and that is okay! 

Guide them to understand that 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! 

Remind students that they can use resources like the V5 Section of the VEX Library to help them as they work through their design ideas. You can also have students browse the VEX Store to see if any additional parts will help them to improve their robot.

You can also use the PD+ Community for support in facilitating robot design changes. Look for ideas that have been posted, or post your own question to the PD+ Community about ways to support students' build iterations. 

For additional guidance on facilitating productive, student-centered engineering conversations—including question ideas and discussion prompts—see this VEX Library Article.