What to set up, print, and stage.

Insert batteries into the bots

One battery per bot — same direction every time, label side up. Charge the batteries the night before so you're not waiting on partial charges as students arrive.

Train every bot to recognize its lines

Each bot needs its line-following sensors calibrated to the field tape and its compass tilt-calibrated. Plan ~5 minutes per bot — for 12 bots, that's an hour. See the line-training notes in the Match Code lesson.

Charge every device

Laptops or tablets for every team, fully charged. The MakeCode editor runs in-browser — you don't need anything installed beyond a working USB connection.

Create teams of 3

Each team has three roles: Coder, Fabricator, Analyst. Roles rotate weekly from Week 2 on, so every student holds every role by Week 4. Decide the team rosters before Day 1 — not in the room — so the Day 1 launch isn't competing with cliques and conversation. Post the rosters on the wall before students arrive (alongside the Driving Question, Bot Names, and Leaderboard spots) so students can find their team without asking, and so role rotations in Week 2 land on something visible to everyone.

Set up the walls and room layout

Three physical-room tasks that make the program legible at a glance:

1. Make the Driving Question poster. Print it large enough to read from every seat in the room: "How can you use data, equations, and code to build a robot athlete that wins on math, not luck?" Post it where it's the first thing students see when they walk in. It stays up for all 16 days.

2. Label the four corners of the room with the four stats. One sign per corner: Speed · Endurance · Turning · Power. Day 3's turning activity sends students to corners by their stat allocation — without labeled corners the activity falls flat.

3. Reserve and label six wall spots. Before students arrive, tape off and label the wall areas they'll fill over the four weeks: Driving Question · Bot Names · Commissioner's Rules · Leaderboard · Rivalry Cards · Math Vocabulary. Leaving these blank-but-named signals "this is where your work goes" from Day 1. (Detail on the Vocabulary wall is item 6 below.)

4. Post a PEMDAS reference poster. The standard order-of-operations poster goes behind your desk or near the math wall — wherever students can glance at it without having to walk over. PEMDAS shows up as a load-bearing concept in five activities from Day 6 onward (Equation Relay's decimal trap, Trashketball's parenthesis-first rule, Endurance Decay's (20−E) step, Endurance Decay Equations' slope-intercept work, Scavenger Hunt's Follow-Through). The poster is ambient reference, not a lesson — it does nothing until a student hits an error and looks up at it. Then it does the work the teacher would otherwise be asked to do.

5. Post the Calculator Policy by activity. Print and post a one-page policy next to the PEMDAS poster. The rule changes by activity, on purpose. The student should understand why the rule changes — in some activities the arithmetic IS the lesson; in others it's overhead.

The reasoning behind the policy, for facilitators: PEMDAS-practice activities are designed to surface order-of-operations errors. A calculator hides those errors — the student gets the right answer without learning the rule, so the activity loses its teaching purpose. Prediction-and-analysis activities have multi-step arithmetic ((20 − E) × 1.5 × t, 0.5(6) + 1) where the lesson is the formula structure, not the computation. A weaker student forced to do that arithmetic by hand will burn out before they reach the actual insight. Allow calculators here. In return, require students to write the equation and the substitution by hand before tapping the calculator — the hand-written setup is the assessment; the calculator just executes it.

Equity framing: a weaker student tapping a calculator in a prediction activity should not feel embarrassed. The policy makes calculator use legitimate for that activity, not a workaround. That is the right design. The student is being assessed on whether they wrote the equation correctly, not on whether they can compute multi-digit decimals in their head.

Assessment moments are the exception because they're where you actually measure understanding — and "can the student do the substitution" is different from "can the student operate a calculator." Exit tickets and diagnostics need to be calculator-free for the data to mean what you want it to mean.

6. Set up the Math Vocabulary wall. Reserve a wide wall area — three feet wide minimum, six feet preferred — labeled Math Vocabulary. It starts empty. Each time a math concept gets introduced in class, the term goes up on the wall the same day, written large enough to read from across the room. Terms stay up for the rest of the program. The purpose is twofold. First, students who hear a term for the first time get a visual anchor — they can look up at the wall during work time and remind themselves what residual analysis or system of inequalities means without asking. Second, when the teacher introduces a new term on Day 11 or 12, students see it sitting next to terms from Days 1–10 — the math has been the same math the whole time, just under different names. By Day 12 the wall has roughly 25 terms on it; every load-bearing math concept students have used.

Pre-print the term cards before Day 1 on cardstock, one term per card, large block letters. Write the day in small text in the bottom corner so a student or facilitator can sort the stack quickly. Walking a card to the wall in the moment the term is first named takes ten seconds; doing it later takes ten minutes of looking back through the day to find where to add it. Full schedule:

Why this works: Maya's experience document shows the moment students hear a math term out loud for the first time as a load-bearing felt-sense moment. *"The thing she has been doing all week has a name."* The Vocabulary Wall makes that moment visible to every student in the room, not just the one whose narrative the document follows. The wall is also a passive tool for any student who needs to look up a term — no asking, no admitting they forgot. They glance up.