I’ve been seeing some amazing videos and photos on social media of VEX GO Competitions happening in elementary spaces, and wow does it make my heart happy to see!! The photos show students’ engagement and motivation clearly, and their collaboration is evident as well. I’d love to hear from teachers in the PD+ Community about how their GO Competitions are going 
What part of the competitions is most meaningful to you and/or your students?
What is something you learned this year that will help you in next year’s competition?
What was the most surprising thing about your competition experience?
I’ll tag @Desiree_White-Price, @Tina_Dietrich, and @Danielle_McCoy to get the ball rolling, since their competitions are in full swing!
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Hi @Audra_Selkowitz! Wow!! We are 2/3 of the way complete with our building competition! As an educator, the most meaningful part of the competition thus far has been watching the students work collaboratively with one another! Students who were anxious and nervous at first throughout the competition, ended the event with smiles, cheers and victories!
As I reflect on this year’s competition, I would like to dedicate more time to holding practice runs with each grade to work through any hiccups. This year, I scheduled time for each 3rd-5th grade classroom to practice beforehand, however, I’d like to hold mini sessions using the VEX leaderboard more effectively. I also want the teams to practice each component (pairing, coding and driving) and then debrief about what went well/what could have been differently. (I.E., journaling/discussions/formative assessment).
I think the most surprising aspect of the competition was how each team strategized a bit differently and ultimately ended up differentiating their own learning to achieve a similar goal of obtaining the most points possible!
Lastly, as I always say… “Do not count out students with disabilities!” As a special education teacher, the students with disabilities were extremely determined and excelled at such an amazing hands-on opportunity!!! VEX truly brings students together in both social and emotional ways 
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@Audra_Selkowitz Our competition was broken into 3 different days by grade level. I have already completed 3rd and 4th…and 5th is coming up tomorrow. I would agree with @Danielle_McCoy because I also loved seeing the students collaborate and work together. They would make suggestions to each other as to which direction they should drive/code the robot in order to get more points, or to get the robot out of a crater they were stuck in. They were more or less coaching each other.
I learned that I will not put the competitions 3 consecutive days! I am exhausted! Luckily I had the weekend to partially recover before going back for round 3! We have so many students in my building that I was running from 9:15 - 3:30 to squeeze everyone in. Also this is the first year we adopted Vex Robotics so our students were very inexperienced with competitions. I feel like next year should run smoother because they will better understand how it works.
For me this was NOT surprising, but for the students it was…so far my winners have been the unexpected ones! Usually competitions are mostly academic, so the students who are not “gifted” or achieve higher academically are the ones who win. Many of the lower achieving students kept saying…“Do I have to?” And once they saw success, the look on their faces alone showed their excitement. They were shocked how well they did. So far, each of the grade level winning teams have students from the learning support and life skills classes. I can’t even describe the reactions when those students won…we were all beaming with pride!
I can’t wait to see how differently these same students will approach this next school year!
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@Audra_Selkowitz @Danielle_McCoy @Desiree_White-Price Wrapping up our Vex Go competition, I asked my 3rd graders to write about what they would change about the robot so that it could complete more tasks…or what would they do differently to score more points. Here’s what they said…
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These are amazing. Love this
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This is amazing! @Alaina_Caulkett and @Aimee_DeFoe and I are all reading them together with the biggest smiles on our faces! “We work too gether like PB and J” is going on my list of life goals from now on
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