How do you keep your students who don’t do well in classroom competitions engaged? I saw the possible Leaderboard post by Lauren and I love the idea of tracking the competition and I know most of my students will be inspired. But it is really hard on the kids who are always last and I sense their frustration. I am not about every child getting a participation ribbon and I do think competition is good. Just curious how you keep students excited to try again with the next build when they are at the bottom of the leaderboard.
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I love this question Laura! I feel similar that I hate seeing kids feeling less than happy at the end of class. I like to mix things up with competitions and fun creative STEM labs or activities. With these activities, my students feel more room is there to be creative and fail if it happens. I also like to embrace that failure with claps and discussions at the end of every lesson. Clean up is important but I love discussing the feelings of team partners after each lesson or activity.
Have you tried discussing with your students what they like, want to see more of or would like to learn with VEX? 
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@Laura_Mackay This is a great question! @Anna_Blake has awesome suggestions in her post for sure. One idea that might be helpful is to make a point of noticing the things the more competition-averse kids are strong in - maybe they keep a really detailed and organized engineering notebook, or are excellent collaborators. Then come up with a way of recognizing those strengths with a shout out, or award of some kind and make that a standard part of your competitions. You could recognize students who do a great job of data-driven decision making, or those who come up with unique solutions to problems (even if they don’t win) or even those who write excellent pseudocode!
Also, I think with time, when students realize your class is a safe place to take risks, they will become more comfortable with classroom competitions in general as well. Keep us posted and let us know how it goes!
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These are all super wonderful suggestions @Aimee_DeFoe and @Anna_Blake! Thank you for sharing. I think @Mark_Johnston might also have some advice for this since I know he does classroom competitions often.
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I like the idea of discussing with my students…I’ll ask them what they think. I am used to having a competition robotics VEX team and part of competing is winning and losing, so it isn’t as big of a deal…you signed up for the team and knew what you are getting into. As I move to using VEX as part of a class project, I think your ideas about mixing it up is wise. Thanks for the advice!
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Keep us posted! I love hearing what works and what you’ve changed. I just started adding competitions into my VEX GO classroom and it’s a great change. I feel like we are learning how to lose and feel ok with it. Both creative and competition-based are important but it’s nice to see how some students work well under pressure and others just give up. This gives me a challenge to help those students!
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