New Classroom Kit and Curriculum

[Jason Morrella]

As many have noticed on our website, we are proud to announce that our newly reformulated Classroom Lab Kit and the brand new Autodesk VEX Robotics Curriculum are both now available.

The Classroom Lab Kit is an enhanced bundle package designed to address the needs of educational robotics. We've taken the input and feedback from teachers, students and teams to add additional parts and accessories that users have told us they want for the classroom and for competition use (over 1160 parts total - but who's counting).

We are also very excited about the new curriculum from Autodesk which provides a great curriculum for teachers wanting either a semester long robotics solution or a modular curriculum where they can pull out certain lessons to fit into a few weeks or months of an already existing class. Also enhanced is our new Educational Resources section with free downloads of various education and competition materials that can be useful in the classroom, at home and at competitions http://www.vexrobotics.com/edr-resources/

We're very excited about the new school year and will continue to listen to the community of schools and teams to help us continue to make VEX Robotics bigger, better and the best value around. The goal is simple - make educational and competitive robotics as educational, accessible, affordable and fun as possible. Thanks to everyone who continues to help us achieve those goals.

[Mary]

Wow, that is great. Even better that the curriculum comes free with it - the teacher we are working with keeps saying he wants to find some curriculum that he can fit in his budget, and now it will be free, and the programming software is just $50 more. We want to have a few teams so all the students can be involved, but we were not sure if we would be able to get a kit, curriculum and pay registration all for under $1000 - but now it looks like we will be able to with Vex. We have been looking at the FTC kit, and still might get one if they are ever available, but this Vex kit looks perfect for us.

[MarkJ]

I agree Mary, I'm surprised that we can get all that for only $699. I just started looking into robotics stuff this weekend to get ready for the new school year and this is a great surprise. We were going to enter one, maybe two Vex teams this year, now I think we will do at least 3 to get more students involved. We've already got some Vex kits from last year, so we'll just get 1 of the classroom kits to start a new team, register 2 more teams and still spend less than $900 for THREE teams with the registration fees being so low. And we'll get curriculum for them to use in the class also for no extra $.
Very good start to the robotics season.

[SusanMeyer]

I just read the press release and think this is great. Kudos to Autodesk for supporting Vex and FRC, it is good to see a company support a variety of programs and to help make sure there are options for all schools at different price points. And thank you to Vex for ensuring schools can build a robotics class and compete with a team for under $1000. I know our schools need that.

[Daviddavid]

The school I'm working with got their classroom kits on Friday, the students went nuts going through everything inside and have spent all day today building robots already. That kit is awesome - we are very glad we decided to continue with the Vex events this year. The teacher loves the curriculum and Inventor software from Autodesk. We even have students working on Inventor already with the curriculum, and we didn't think we'd be doing CAD stuff at all this year.

The side of the box with pictures from the Vex World championship is very cool also, those teams must be stokedto be on the packaging. We're excited and can't wait to get to our first tournament.
The press release you mentioned is herehttp://www.vexrobotics.com/docs/VEX_...e-08282008.pdf, and here's the picture of the entire kit.

[MidWFirst]

We got our vex classroom lab kits this week and now I can't get the students to concentrate on anything else. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the curriculum, and they already built working robots in the first 2-3 days. I was worried about teaching robotics in class this year, and now it's a piece of cake - we may even allocate more weeks to the robotics stuff than I had planned.

I don't know anything about CAD, but we've already got a group of students working with the Inventor software that came with the order - we might need to start a new class just for CAD and animation in addition to working on the robots, the students just love it. It's kind of refreshing to have students asking if they can come in during lunch and after school to work on their robots and the inventor software, I'm not used to having to kick students out of the room, but I guess it's a good problem to have.