Implementing VEX GO STEM Labs

STEM Labs are designed to be the online teacher’s manual for VEX GO. Like a printed teacher’s manual, the teacher-facing content of the STEM Labs provides all of the resources, materials, and information needed to be able to plan, teach, and assess with VEX GO. Students see the Lab Image Slideshows as their teacher facilitates the Lab, while the teacher has all the discussion prompts, activity steps, and facilitation strategies at their fingertips.

To plan, teachers can read and review the concepts, activities, facilitation strategies, and discussion prompts for the STEM Lab. To teach, teachers can make the materials their own - presenting the concepts as they facilitate the Lab activities and conversations, and using the Lab Image Slideshows as the student-facing companion throughout the Lab. To assess, strategies are offered in the STEM Labs as well, for teachers to use at their discretion.

STEM Labs are the toolbox for teachers to pull from, as they bring STEM learning to life in their classrooms.

Every STEM Lab has a common structure that should make it easy to find what you need. Planning for a STEM Lab starts by looking at the Goals and Standards section then reviewing the Summary section to get a deeper sense of the activities within the STEM Lab and how long it might take.

An individual STEM Lab might take approximately 40 minutes in one classroom, while another classroom will choose to complete it over several days. Students may be excited to extend their learning with specific STEM Labs depending on their background with the material, and their personal interests. If you want to extend a STEM Lab further, you can always choose to do the activities from the Choice Board with your class.

A full materials list is available in the summary so that it is easy to gather all needed materials and prepare before beginning the STEM Lab. Each material has a specific purpose and recommendation for how many is needed for the classroom, taking the guesswork out of STEM Lab preparations.

Use the Robotics Roles & Routines to facilitate students' organization and collaboration. The Robotics Roles & Routines sheet, in conjunction with the "Suggested Role Responsibilities" slide in the Lab slideshow offers guidance for group work. See the Using Robotics Roles & Routines to Support Group Work with VEX GO article for more information about how to use this tool with students.

The Lab Summary provides a quick overview of each section of the STEM Lab: Engage, Play, and Share. When students start to ask what they are doing next, there’s a quick and easy answer ready to go.

Each STEM Lab includes a Lab Image Slideshow, which serves as the student-facing component of the STEM Lab content. Every image in the teacher-facing STEM Labs, is included in the Lab Image Slideshow - offering ready made visual aides, so teachers do not have to make them on their own. The slides can be displayed for students in the classroom, and offer visual context for the conversations, activities, and concepts being taught through the Lab. Teachers move through the slides as they move through the sections of the Lab, using the STEM Lab as reference material for their teaching.

The student-facing materials of STEM Labs are intentionally minimal, as the goal of the STEM Labs is for students to be actively building, coding, collaborating, and engaging with STEM concepts. VEX GO is designed to be a hands-on platform, so students are tangibly working to see STEM concepts in action, instead of just reading about them.

Each step in the STEM Labs are written out to make implementing in your classroom easy! The Engage section explains how to introduce the Lab and help students foster the personal connection with the Lab. Remember, the information in the STEM Lab is a teacher resource, and is meant to be taught from, not directly viewed or projected for student consumption.

To begin, the Acts and Asks section offers prompts for a guided discussion and demonstration to introduce the concepts explored in the Lab. The Acts give ideas for what to do, and the Asks give verbal prompts for what to stay inline with each action. Again, think of this as part of your teacher’s manual - meant to be read to students, not by students.

Then, begin building! Build Instructions are linked in each Lab where a specific build is called for. These pictorial directions should be shared directly with students, so the teacher can facilitate students’ building processes.

Each STEM Lab follows the same format for Play sections, making it simple to introduce to your students and to explain what steps they will follow to complete an activity. Again, this material is meant as a teacher reference, and should be used to aid in the facilitation of the Lab activities, not read directly by students.

1. Play Part 1: In this section, you will Instruct, Model, Facilitate, Remind, and Ask students. Each prompt has specific instructions so you never have to worry about how you’re going to facilitate a discussion or instruct the students to do something. Utilize these steps as you would those in a traditional teacher’s manual. 
2. Mid-Play Break: Bring your students back together as a class! Ask students the guided questions provided to check for understanding or to clarify any student questions.
3. Play Part 2: In this section, you will Instruct, Model, Facilitate, Remind, and Ask students. Each prompt has specific instructions so you never have to worry about how you’re going to facilitate a discussion or instruct the students to do something. Utilize these steps as you would those in a traditional teacher’s manual. 

The Share section explains how to make learning visible by creating a discussion where students can talk about their learning during the STEM Lab.

1. Bring students together in a group.
2. Ask students questions from these categories to facilitate a discussion.
   
   • Observing: Questions related to what the students observed in the activity.
   • Predicting: Questions to predict how these concepts could apply in other scenarios of their lives or school subjects.
   • Collaborating: Questions relating to the collaboration of the groups during the activity.