VEX IQ Curriculum
It’s Your Future
Lesson 01
Project Overview
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Its Your Future
Let’s Get Started
Your First Robot
Simple Machines & Motion
Chain Reaction Challenge
Key Concepts
Mechanisms
Highrise Challenge
Smart Machines
Chain Reaction Programming Challenge
Smarter Machines
Highrise Programming Challenge
HIGHRISE PROGRAMMING CHALLENGE
Whether you’re going to attend an official VEX IQ Challenge Event, host your own event, or
just just play the game in your classroom, it’s time to design and build a robot for the full
autonomous robotics game challenge! Use your knowledge of the VEX IQ platform and all
you’ve learned in previous lessons to create a VEX IQ robot for the Programming Skills
Challenge portion of the Highrise game!
LESSON 12 STARTER
Prints out for the lesson
Chain Reaction
Idea Book Exercise
Teacher US guide sheet
Student hand-out
LESSON 12
LESSON 12 STARTER
Learning objective: Utilise the design process for robot design. Trouble shoot and
problem solve technical issues. Complete a design, build and test challenge.
The Game Rules
All important information (including the official game manual) can be found at the Highrise
Challenge wiki page. Click here for the wiki page.
Important Notes
- Your teacher will need to obtain the Highrise Field & Game Elements and VEX IQ Challenge
Field for this unit OR obtain just the Highrise Field & Game Elements and create a similar field
from easy to obtain items.
- Alternatively, your teacher could also get creative and design a game of his or her own for you
to design and build for.
- If you’ve already built a robot for the teleoperated portions of the Highrise Challenge, you only
need to add sensors and then program your robot to complete the challenge autonomously!
LESSON 12 STARTER
Idea Book Page: The Engineering Notebook
You are provided with an Idea Book page in this unit that can be
used to develop a full Engineering Notebook. Use as many of
these pages as you need to document your robot and
programming ideas, build, fixes, changes, and improvements for
the game challenge. Alternatively, teachers and students are
encouraged, when comfortable, to use the Robotics Engineering
Notebook (provided to registered VEX IQ Challenge teams and
also sold separately) for this purpose instead.
Robot Challenge Evaluation Rubric
This rubric can be used to assess your challenge robot in up to
eleven technical and non-technical categories. No matter how
your teacher chooses to use the rubric, it will be obvious that
your PROCESS and your PRODUCT (robot) are equally important.
LESSON 12 STARTER
Today you are going to complete a brainstorming activity with student teams (large
group or small) to generate ideas on how to best play the game (strategy) and what
kind of robot can achieve a set of desired goals.
Task 1: Use Idea Book pages or Engineering Notebook to brainstorm and generate
ideas of how best to play the game.
Once you have done this as a team, sketch out your robot design ideas again using a
different page of your Idea book or Engineering Notebook.
LESSON 12 STARTER
Task 2: Design-build-test your robot
In your teams design, build, and test your programmed robot for the given challenge
using the “THINK-DO-TEST” approach to completing their Idea Book pages or
Engineering Notebook entries all while building within the constrains of the
challenge rules.
Use the Robot Challenge Evaluation Rubric as a vehicle for improvement during the
process and/or to assess final designs.
LESSON 12 PLENARY
As a class, let us consider the following questions?
A. How did you go about designing your robot?
B. What type of mechanisms and sensors did you use?
C. What problems did you encounter?
D. How did you overcome your problems?
SUMMARY
Learning objective: Utilise the design process for robot design. Trouble shoot and
problem solve technical issues. Complete a design, build and test challenge.
Today you have:
 Learnt how to design in teams.
 Built a robot and evaluated it using a rubric.
 Learnt how to apply your knowledge of mechanisms, sensors and VEXIQ to
attempt the Highrise Programming Challenge.