Quote:
Originally Posted by Allison K
Also, I forgot to mention in my earlier post that I love the engineering notebooks in VEX IQ. So much so that I'm having my FLL teams keep an engineering notebook this year as well. I'm not sure how they'll be integrated into judging with FLL, but they are a formally recognized part of the IQ structure.
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FLL Judge here. This will win you major, major brownie points in the "Strategy and Innovation" section of the rubric.
Throwing my vote in for FLL and LEGOs, for a couple of reasons.
-Much like comparing VEX vs. Tetrix when it first came out, you have to consider that LEGOs have been around for ages, whereas VEX IQ is still really in development. LEGO has a truly mind-boggling backlog of parts with which to use. It's easy to look only at the contents of the base kits, but LEGO has put out pneumatic systems, basically every type of gear under the sun, more structure components than I can count,
3rd party sensor support, and so on. On the software side, there are tons of 3rd party options available for more advanced students such as
NQC and NXC, which can really open up the platform further.
-Your average kid who is interested in joining a robotics program owns 5+ LEGO sets. This means that they are already very familiar with the construction techniques involved, and may have their own parts that they'll want to add to their robots. Much less often the case with VEX IQ.
-If you haven't, take a good, in-depth look at an FLL challenge sometime. The quality and depth of the table challenge design is simply incredible. From the wide range of difficulty from easy to near-impossible, solid integration of the challenge theme and connections to real world engineering challenges, mechanism inspiration provided by the mission modules, and the hefty supply of LEGO parts that come with your registration for use in future years, Scott Evans does an absolutely incredible job. I've been less impressed with the VEX IQ games so far, as they feel more like dumbed-down VRC games, where FLL feels designed specifically for the age group.
-I kind of like that FLL forces autonomy, as it exposes students to a very large element of robotics that they would not tend to seek out otherwise. I've taught summer camps for LEGOs where I used solutions to allow driver control. In these classes, students weren't motivated to then seek out sensors and autonomy, because they knew they could do it better with the controller. When I introduced autonomous tasks first, they naturally progressed much further on the software side.
-I love the research project. The sheer creativity your kids can have will surprise you. Judging these projects blows my mind every single year.