How to Start a School Robotics Club with VEX IQ
A practical plan for your first three robotics club sessions, the habits that keep a club running, and how to tie it to the curriculum, written for teachers starting from zero.
Most teachers who start a school robotics club did not begin as roboticists. They were maths, science or computing teachers who saw a box of kits, a few curious students and a free Thursday afternoon. If that is you, the good news is that the hardest part of a robotics club is not the robot. It is knowing what to do in the first three sessions, how to keep eight or ten students productive at once, and what to do when something does not work.
This guide is the practical version of what we teach in our Erasmus+ course VEX IQ Robotics for Teachers, a five-day, hands-on course in Ptuj for teachers of roughly ages 8 to 14. No robotics or programming experience is required, so everything below assumes you are starting from zero.
Why VEX IQ works well for a first club
VEX IQ is a snap-together building system: pieces connect without tools, so the first lesson can be about driving a robot rather than hunting for screws. It is programmed in VEXcode IQ, which starts with drag-and-drop blocks and lets students move to text-based code when they are ready. That gives a club a natural path. Younger or newer students stay with blocks, while older students can open the same project in a text view and see what the blocks were doing all along.
Just as important for a teacher: the robot gives immediate, visible feedback. When a program is wrong, the robot does something wrong in front of everybody. Students debug because they want to, not because you told them to.
Your first three sessions
Session 1: build and drive
Skip the lecture. Hand each pair of students a prepared, simple drivebase and give them one task: make the robot drive to a marked line on the floor and stop. Let them discover that "drive forward" needs a distance, that turning needs an angle, and that the floor is not as slippery or as straight as they hoped. By the end of the session every pair has a working program, and you have not explained anything yet.
Session 2: sensors and decisions
Now add a sensor. Ask the robot to stop before it hits a wall, or to follow a line. This is where conditions ("if the distance is less than...") appear naturally, and where measurement, estimation and data come into the conversation. It is also a good moment to introduce the idea of testing: change one thing, run it again, write down what happened.
Session 3: a team challenge
Give the whole club one challenge with a clear goal, a time limit and a score: for example, move three objects into a marked zone. Students split roles (builder, programmer, driver, note-taker), try, fail and improve. This is the format that makes robotics clubs stick, because it turns a series of exercises into something students want to get better at.
What to do about the "AI" part
Our course also includes hands-on work with the VEX AI vision sensor, which can recognise coloured objects and tags. It is a gentle, concrete way to introduce what people mean by machine "seeing": the robot does not understand a ball, it compares what the camera reports against what it was taught. Students quickly see why lighting matters and why the same program sometimes works and sometimes does not, which is an honest first lesson in how AI systems behave.
Five habits that keep a club running
- Work in pairs, not alone. Two students per robot keeps everyone talking and halves the number of kits you need to manage.
- Give roles and rotate them. Otherwise one student drives and the others watch.
- Keep a build log. A few photos and two sentences per session. It becomes assessment evidence and a great exhibit for parents' evening.
- Plan a visible end point. A friendly mini-tournament between teams, or a demonstration for another class, gives the term a finish line.
- Let students teach each other. The student who solved line following last week is the best person to explain it this week.
Connecting the club to the curriculum
A club is easier to defend to a head teacher when it clearly supports maths, science, technology and computing objectives. Measurement, ratios, angles, speed, variables, algorithms and testing all appear naturally. In the course we spend a full day on challenge-based, cross-curricular learning: how to design projects, write simple rubrics and assess practical work fairly, and how to adapt activities for different ages and abilities.
What a five-day course covers
If you would rather learn all of this hands-on, alongside teachers from other European countries, this is how the week in Ptuj is structured:
- Monday: welcome, tour of RoboTech STEM Center, VEX IQ foundations and building a classroom robot.
- Tuesday: a cultural day, with a morning session on robotics and STEM in European curricula and a guided visit of the historic town of Ptuj.
- Wednesday: programming and sensors in VEXcode IQ, from blocks to a first step into text-based code.
- Thursday: AI vision and challenge-based learning, with cross-curricular lessons, rubrics and assessment.
- Friday: competition formats, a friendly mini-tournament, and a personal implementation plan for your own school.
Roughly two thirds of every day is practical work with VEX IQ kits, in pairs and small international groups. You leave with worksheets, example lessons, project ideas and a concrete plan for starting your own club. Every participant receives a certificate of attendance whose learning outcomes are written so it can be used together with Europass.
Not sure whether the course is right for you? Write to us before you apply. We are happy to talk through your school's situation and to help you describe the training in your Erasmus+ application.
