Building a VEX GO Competition Field

Building a VEX GO Competition field can be fun and engaging for your students. We recommend that students take the time to build the VEX GO Competition field rather than teachers or coaches. Building the field will give students an introduction to working with Build Instructions, experience building in a team, and experience working with VEX parts.

To find VEX GO Competition Build Instructions, go to builds.vex.com. The Competition Build Instructions are at the bottom of the VEX GO page.

This article will cover different tips for building a VEX GO Competition Field with your students.

Build Tiles One at a Time

The VEX GO Competition Fields are built with square tiles that snap together. It is recommended to break up students into their groups and have each group focusing on building individual tiles. The instructions for building the field are broken down to individual tiles, so it is easy to distribute the instructions to groups.

Introduce the Competition in Stages

Each Mission is divided into four Stages. The stages introduce the game, scoring and rules in increments. Stages allow the students to focus their robot builds on a subset of the tasks.

Mars Math Expedition Stage 1

Mars Math Expedition Stage 2

Mars Math Expedition Stage 3

Mars Math Expedition Stage 4

It is recommended that students work with each stage as a way to get familiar with the Mission. First break your students into groups and then they can follow the rough steps below for guidance.

1. Build the first stage competition field
2. Build robots
3. Compete
4. Build the next stage competition field
5. Improve the robots
6. Compete

Then repeat steps 4-6.

Building in stages gets students to the fun of competition faster. Building in stages also allows students to learn and understand the rules in smaller increments, increasing rule comprehension. This also allows them to gain understanding of how to accomplish the easiest tasks first, building confidence.