Our teams compete in VEX IQ, the elementary and middle school level of VEX Robotics. A season means designing a robot for that year's game, building it, rebuilding it, and taking it to tournaments against other teams.
Teams, elementary and middle school
Roles on a team, every one of them accountable
Engineering notebook per team, and it is judged
The competition we build for
Same lab, same field, completely different energy.
Students are referred to by team, not by name. We do not publish students' names or close-up photographs without a parent's written permission.
Every VEX IQ season has a new game with its own scoring rules. Before anyone picks up a beam, the team works out where the points are and what kind of robot collects them fastest. Most bad robots are the answer to a question nobody checked.
First versions are meant to be wrong. The team builds a mechanism, runs it, finds the failure, and changes one thing. Then again. A season has dozens of these loops and the notebook records all of them.
We rehearse the judge interview. Each student has to explain their own part: what it does, why it is built that way, what they would change with one more week. Nobody reads from a script, because judges ask follow-up questions.
A tournament is a long day in a crowded room. Pit tables down both sides, a hundred kids, parents, and a field in the middle with a referee and a scoreboard.
The students carry the robot in, set up their table, and then handle whatever the day gives them. A motor dies between matches. A part shears. The schedule moves. Nobody at the pit table is going to solve it for them, and that is the point of being there.
By the time they go home they have done something that most adults do not do in a year: shipped a thing they built, in public, against a deadline, and then explained it to a stranger.
You arrive in the morning and set up at a pit table with your kit, your spare parts and your notebook. Matches run on a schedule all day, each one a couple of minutes long, with a scoreboard on the wall and referees on the field. Between matches the team fixes whatever broke. Somewhere in the day a judge comes to the pit and interviews the students about their robot.
A judge interview is a conversation where the team explains their robot and their season: what it does, how they built it, what they would change, what they are proudest of. Judged awards are decided on this and on the engineering notebook, not only on match scores. It is also the part that teaches the most, because a student cannot fake understanding of something out loud.
No. Weekly classes run on their own and most students are not on a team. Competition is for the students who want that kind of pressure and that kind of deadline.
Tournaments are local to Southern California. Ask us about the current season calendar before you commit, so you know the Saturdays in advance.
Happy Kids 
