In the VEX AIM Intro Course, task cards are used as a learning tool for students as they engage in hands-on guided practice and unit challenges. This article will help you understand how to use task cards in your setting, to best meet the needs of your students.
The Purpose of a Task Card
The task card is a metacognitive tool designed to help students monitor and communicate their progress and learning with you, and with each other. Giving each student a task card fosters student autonomy throughout their practice, as they can use the task card to keep track of where they are with the task, engage in thoughtful collaborative discussion with their group, and document their learning. As the teacher, you can use students' task cards to help guide your interactions with them, looking to see which parts of the task they have completed so far, talking about documentation, or checking in to see if they have met the success criteria.
Task cards are designed for individual student interactive use. This means that each student should have their own task card, and should be able to write on it in some way, either on a physical copy or digitally, as best meets their needs. That way, each student can use the task card in the way that helps them make sense of the task at hand. Individual students may document the same task differently, and that is a great learning opportunity to share how they are understanding the task, or creating a mental model of an activity.
Task cards promote autonomy and collaboration. While each student's task card can capture their learning, features like Discussion Prompts foster meaningful collaboration and discussion. The task card can be a communication tool for students to share their ideas, questions, progress, and thinking with both peers and teachers. However, the individual nature of the task card honors each student's sense-making about the task at hand or concept they are focusing on.
Logistics of Using Task Cards in the Classroom
There are a few key recommendations to help you make the most of task cards with your students.
- Task cards are linked in the student and teacher materials for each lesson. You will find the task card linked in the step in which it is to be used in the Guided Practice section.
- Distribute the task card as students reach that step of the lesson. Task cards are designed to be use during Guided Practice, to inform and guide students collaborative work.
- Task cards are editable, and can be adjusted to best meet your students' needs. Students should each have a task card to work with throughout Guided Practice, but the task cards themselves are not set in stone, they are a teaching and learning tool. You know your students best, and can edit the task card in any way to better accommodate your students experiences.
- Task cards are meant for individual student use. Be sure that each student has access to a task card to use and interact with during class. Be mindful of this when printing task cards for a class, or determining how you will distribute the task card.
- Ensure students can interact with the task card. Printing task cards will enable students to hand write on them, but you can also distribute task cards digitally, for students to type or write on as meets their needs.
- Keep task cards in student journals as artifacts of their learning. The task cards hold evidence of student thinking and learning and should be kept as part of students' journals, so they can refer back to them in later lessons or units.
Anatomy of a Task Card
Each task card has several key features to promote progress monitoring, collaboration, and visible learning.
Students are reminded of the Practice Task at the top of the page, and should use the Practice Checklist to check off each part of the task as they complete it. This gives students a way to keep track of where they are in guided practice, and a clear visual for you to see how students are progressing. The final checklist item highlights the collaborative nature of guided practice, in ensuring that all group members participate in completing the task.
Additional support for progress monitoring is provided with the Feeling Stuck prompt and Success Criteria. Feeling Stuck offers support for problem solving, to give students an option besides asking the teacher, if they need help.
The Success Criteria are for the teacher check in to determine if a group has completed the guided practice task successfully. They should be checked off by students and teachers together.
The Discussion Questions are for students to talk about in their groups as they are working through the practice task, to promote collaborative learning and discourse. Students may disagree on the answer to the question, and can then share their thinking and evidence to try to come to consensus as they practice.
The bottom half of the task card is for student documentation, to give them tools and strategies to practice documenting and making their thinking visible. Students should use this space as best meets their needs. The sentence stem is provided to help students think more deeply about the sense making done during practice. The task card should be used in conjunction with student journals to help students find the documentation strategies that work best for them.
Using Driving and Coding Task Cards
Beginning in Unit 3, the Guided Practice section has students move between driving and coding to build, test, and iterate on a VEXcode AIM project to complete the practice task. As such, there are two task cards in each lesson.
- The task card for driving is designed to focus students' attention on developing a physical model of their task, by driving the robot to complete it and documenting its movement before they begin to code. To complete this task card, students should share a hypothesis with you, the teacher, about how they think they will code the robot to complete the task based on their driving.
- The task card for coding is designed to focus students' attention on developing a computational model of the task, as they code from their hypothesis. It further supports student exploration and iteration to improve their project, by making that process part of the practice task, checklist, and success criteria.
To learn more about facilitating the driving coding cycle, view this article.
Additional Tips and Considerations
- Have students document their answers to the Discussion Questions in their journals to capture their learning. They can note their ideas and the consensus they came to as a group. You can also bring these questions to whole class discussions to see how different groups answered them, and extend the discourse.
- Make students documentation visible for the whole class, so they can learn from and with one another about different strategies for documenting and making sense of a concept or challenge.
- Use task cards during whole class discussions to extend the conversation and reference what students wrote as evidence to support their claims.
- Encourage students to learn from other groups as they complete their practice. Looking to see how another group approaches a task, or how someone else documents a project on their task card, can help students deepen their learning, problem solve, or learn a new way of doing something.