Classroom Resource: EV3 & WeDo 2.0 Quick Kit Inventory
One house-keeping task that many teachers have questions about, is how often to organize and inventory the EV3 kits. Most teachers recommend that the kit be organized as indicated in the included placards on a daily basis (when a project is disassembled, all parts are placed in the indicated spot on the upper of lower storage trays). This greatly reduces building time for a new project.
How often to inventory is a more complicated questions. Most teachers inventory the kits at the beginning and end of a semester/quarter. Many teachers prefer to re-arrange their team memberships throughout a course and if this is done between building projects, this a also convenient time to inventory the kits. The question of how to inventory EV3 parts also has alternative solutions.
An exhaustive inventory for all 500+ parts using the EV3 Placard pdf's (from EV3 Kit Overview lesson) can be quite time consuming. Some teachers prefer to do a periodic inventory of just the key elements in the kit. To speed this approach up, Ray Gutierrez (Washington Middle School, Olympia, WA) created 8.5x11 sheets with the key elements from the EV3 kits. Students placed these sheets on their desk and laid the indicated parts on each sheet. This allowed Ray to periodically determine if all of the kits were largely complete in a very timely manner. Other teachers have used this approach, but with even fewer parts (just the most frequently used parts) included on the sheets. Placing the components you want to inventory on a photocopier will create 1:1 scale inventory templates like these. Placing these placards in glossy sheet protectors allows for easy mark-up of missing parts (using dry-erase markers) and the placards store easily in the EV3 kit. Rays' placards have been recreated for EV3 (see attachments below). There are a set of 4 placards available in color and 4 placards available in black and white, as well as a complete EV3 element survey.
Also attached are three similar sheets from Steve Youngs (Olympia Regional Learning Academy), however Steve arranges the parts according to the EV3 upper organizers tray (2 sheets) and the lower compartment (1 sheet). He also accounts for all components of the kit.
Finally, the attached Word Document by Polly Carlson (Royal City School District, WA) is a WeDo 2.0 Quick Inventory Sheet set.
