Hi Guys! This is Nick Lin from team 73335T. I had been leading team 66799B in my previous Middle School team of American School in Taichung last year during the 2018-2019 Turning Point season before I transfered school and joined team 73335T. I had written the engineering notebook for team 66799B and were fortunate enough to win the design award in the TIRT VEX robotics competiton.

Currently I am helping out our team's documenting expert Jerry on notetaking for the engineering notebook, and I thought that I should give you some of my tips on writing a engineering notebook too! Below will be my tips on writting a good engineering notebook for your VRC competitions. Enjoy!

A good Engineering Notebook Must include:

• Table of Contents
• Lots of drawings
• A Gantt chart
• The Team and the member roles (suggested to get creative about the member role names, so invent roles if you have to. “Battery boy” was one role mentioned by a Worlds Excellence Award winner.)
• The Challenge. Describe the challenge at the beginning of the notebook with words and pictures and states the team’s goals toward accomplishing that challenge.
• Brainstorming. Generates an extensive list of possible approaches to the challenge with labeled diagrams.
• Select Approach. Explains why the selected approach was chosen, and why the other alternatives were not chosen.
• Daily Entries (for both build & designing and programming). Needed to include the following:
  • Today’s date
  • Meeting Attendances
  • Goals for the day’s meeting
  • What the team have done in that meeting with drawn pictures if possible
• Test & Redesign. Describes in great detail the process of troubleshooting, testing, and redesigning through all iterations (cycles) of the process.

Maybe include:

• Tournament breakdowns
• Hours worked on everyday
• Game Overview (in words)
• Problem Statement (problems of how to score)
• Design Statement
  (ex. Design, build, and compete with a robot that can efficiently score all VEX game components in VEX’s 2018/2019 game, Turning Point)
• Constraints

  Examples:

  • Robot must be 18x18x18
  • VEX Materials only
  • Must be able to score by ______ (when)
  • Strategies (Defensive and Offensive)

Other Things to Consider:

• bound quad-ruled notebook is the preferred format
• team # on the cover
• written in ink with errors crossed out using a single line; NEVER remove a page
• pages numbered, dated, and signed/initialed by student
• a table of contents
• team meeting notes as they relate to the design process
• design concepts and sketches
• Pictures
• notes from competitions regarding observations that should be considered in the next iteration of their design
• team members’ observations and thoughts on their design
• team organization practices as they relate to their design process
• any other documentation that a team finds useful as related to their robots design
• notes on the robot’s computer code how the code is designed to interact with the robot’s mechanical systems to create an overall integrated system
• placement of sensors for software feedback systems and algorithms used for the control of the robot should be clearly documented
• computer code or CAD drawings should be glued or taped into the notebook

Great additional resources:

• https://renegaderobotics.org/all-about-vex-judged-awards
• https://www.roboticseducation.org/documents/2017/07/team-design-notebooks-and-team-journals.pdf
• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfKWW3x6_dPH5QFTZ1o8-gwKN_E8zVPMV

• https://www.roboticseducation.org/documents/2016/11/vrc-engineering-notebook-team-1575a.pdf