Notebook Walkthrough
Step-by-step notebook guide
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Step-by-step notebook guide
Last updated
Was this helpful?
We'll go through most of the notebook sections you should include, with examples. Every page of the notebook should make it easier for the judges to give your team a perfect score on the notebook rubric.
Here's the notebook rubric, for reference: https://recf.org/documents/2023/06/guide-to-judging.pdf/#page=40&zoom=100,44,62
These should go at the front of your notebook; they organize and propel the rest of the notebook.
The title page should prominently feature the team name, number, and logo (if you have one). This allows the judges to easily identify which notebook is yours and makes it more memorable when they are distributing awards.
The table of contents organizes the rest of the notebook. When appropriate, each entry should be color-coded based on the Engineering Design Process. For example, the game introduction falls under the "ask" step, so it's colored red in the table of contents below. There are a number of ways to format the table of contents itself, but it should be clear when each entry was made and what step of the Engineering Design Process it shows.
The Engineering Design Process is the essence of VEX Robotics. Thus, a brief description of the process, in the form of a graphic or text, should be included in the notebook. Make sure to cite your sources for images that are taken from another website!
After the Engineering design process, you should include a brief description of the team. This helps the judges match faces to teams, and makes your notebook more memorable. For a great example of a team profile (and other good notebook advice), check out https://wiki.purduesigbots.com/team-administration/team-documentation/how-to-start-a-notebook/segments-of-the-notebook#the-team
Next, we recommend including a page about how the notebook is formatted. This should give the judges a basic idea of how the notebook is set up, and allow them to navigate and grade the notebook quickly.
The goals section can be very short, but your team should outline a few targets to reach. A few example goals:
Qualifying to States / Worlds
Winning a tournament
Learning a new programming technique
Building a low friction drivetrain
A GANTT chart is a simple, concise, and effective time management tool. It gives a rough outline of how much time should be allocated to each aspect of robotics and demonstrates advanced time management skills. Here's an example early-season GANTT chart:
Following 515R's example, we recommend including a budgeting page at the beginning of the notebook. This will help your team to get a realistic estimate of the financial resources necessary to compete at the level you want to. Again, this shows the judges that your team can manage the project diligently and effectively.
These pages make up the bulk of the notebook; they document the designing, building, testing, and refining of the robot and game strategy.
The game analysis section has four main goals:
Describe the goals of the game and how to score points
Document the specifications of field and game elements
Discuss the game rules in-depth
Determine which game strategies are viable
The engineering notebook rubric states that teams must:
Identify the game and robot design challenges in detail at the start of each design process cycle with words and pictures. State the goals for accomplishing the challenge
Thus, it is important to explicitly lay out the goals for the game. Here's a simple example for VEX Over Under:
Next, make sure to identify the dimensions of each field element and game piece. This will come in handy later, during the designing phase. Here's an example of the goal dimensions in Over Under.
After that, describe the specific rules of the game. We recommend giving a broad overview of the scoring and penalty rules, then summarizing each specific game rule.
Then, list out some of the potential strategies that might be viable. This will help with the designing of the robot later on, as it shows you which aspects of the game are the most important. We analyzed 7-8 different strategies in Over Under; here's a small snippet:
While not technically required by the rubric, adding a short and sweet section on the basic design constraints in VEX adds an element of completeness.
This is where your team generates possible designs for the robot.
The Engineering Notebook Rubric states that the notebook should
List three or more possible solutions to the challenge with labeled diagrams. Citations provided for ideas that came from outside sources such as online videos or other teams.
Each subsystem of the robot should have at least three unique designs, in order to earn full credit on the rubric. Each design should include a full CAD (or at least a detailed drawing), as well as labels for each aspect of the design. Then, explain the design and list the advantages and disadvantages of it. Here's an example page showcasing a possible design for the drivetrain:
At this point, your team should have analyzed the game and identified three possible designs for each subsystem of the robot. But how do you know which design you should build?
That's the purpose of a decision matrix; it determines the best design by comparing each design's strengths and weaknesses. Testing also works, but the decision matrix is more efficient.
The Engineering Notebook Rubric says that the notebook must:
Explain why the solution was selected through testing and/or a decision matrix. Fully describes the plan to implement the solution.
Here's an example of a decision matrix for the drivetrain. Make sure to explain each criteria in the decision matrix. See the page on decision matrices for more information on how to make one.
Furthermore, make sure to fully describe the plan to implement the solution. The plan doesn't have to be extremely detailed or complex, but it does have to be there.
Now, it's time for the fun part! Once you've determined the best design, it's time to build it!
According to the Engineering Design Rubric, the notebook should:
Record the steps to build and program the solution. Includes enough detail that the reader can follow the logic used by the team to develop their robot design, as well as recreate the robot design from the documentation.
That is, the notebook should include enough detail that anyone could re-create the exact robot just from the notebook and the materials used. Label images as much as possible, and make sure to explain every last screw on the robot and why it is there. Here's an example of a page detailing how part of an intake was built:
It's worth noting that you should also include the full code of the robot after every major revision. When only a small part of the code changes, only include that bit of code, and make sure to describe what changed and why.
Here's a small snippet of a main loop, in C++
Does the robot work? Well, there's only one way to find out. Test it!
The Engineering Notebook Rubric is very clear; the notebook should
Record all the steps to test the solution, including test results.
There's a lot of freedom in terms of how you decide test the robot. Of course, the tests should be a valid measure of the effectiveness of the robot or subsystem. Here's an example of a drivetrain test:
Tournaments are a great way to stress-test the robot under intense gameplay. After each tournament, your team should analyze:
How and why the robot malfunctioned
Number of points scored from each element of the game in each match
Other robot designs and strategies that worked well
Here's an example of how to document the problems the robot encountered:
Here's an example of scoring analysis from Spin Up. Note how we kept track of how we scored points, which allows us to see our strengths and weaknesses.
Here's an example of how to analyze other strategies (for Spin Up):
At some point in every team's season, they will realize that their current robot simply will not do. Then, they are forced to redesign and start from scratch.
The Engineering Notebook Rubric is well aware of this fact; one of the requirements is
Show that the design process is repeated multiple times to improve performance on a design goal, or robot/game performance.
Thus, a redesign has to be properly justified in the notebook. Perhaps the robot needs a faster drivetrain or a smaller chassis, so it can navigate the field faster. Or maybe the other mechanisms on the robot can be replaced with something better. Whatever it is, make sure the notebook explains why the new design will be better than the old one.
Here's an example of a redesign justification from Spin Up:
This part of the notebook is intuitive, but often overlooked or implemented inconsistently. For each meeting, there should be set goals, and the notebook should evaluate whether or not the team met those goals at the end of the meeting. Additionally, the notebook should keep track of time and resource constraints that are relevant to the team.
The Engineering Notebook Rubric puts it this way:
Provides a complete record of team and project assignments; team meeting notes including goals, decisions, and building/programming accomplishments; Design cycles are easily identified. Resource constraints including time and materials are noted throughout.
There are a couple of ways to do this; we recommend setting 2-4 goals per meeting and evaluating the meeting at the end. For example, here's the very first part of a meeting entry:
And here's the corresponding summary at the end of the meeting:
We've covered 90% of the notebook, but there are a couple more requirements to keep in mind (based on the Engineering Notebook Rubric). Here's the first one:
Team shows evidence of independent inquiry from the beginning stages of their design process
This simply means that teams should take initiative and test their own designs, instead of simply copying from another team online.
The next requirement refers to the completeness of the notebook:
Records the entire design and development process in such clarity and detail that the reader could recreate the project’s history.
That is, every aspect of the designing, building, coding, and testing of the robot should be included in the notebook so well that anybody could build the exact robot using only the notebook as a guide.
The last requirement is why all of the example notebook pages have dates and signatures (yes, they were redacted) in the footer of each page:
Five (5) points if the notebook has evidence that documentation was done in sequence with the design process. This can take the form of dated entries with the names of contributing students included and an overall system of organization. For example, numbered pages and a table of contents with entries organized for future reference
See the "Formatting" article for a good example of how to incorporate digital signatures in the notebook.
That's it! Follow all of the above steps, and your notebook will shine!
