8926W High Stakes Notebook

Hello,

I am Peter from 8926W and I have been in robotics for 6 years now. This year our team won 15 awards with 7 of those being design awards and 1 being an excellence award.

I wanted to give back a little to the notebooking community and release this years notebook.

Here is the drive link, it is a little large since the notebook is around 900-1000 pages.

I will answer as many questions as I can but expect a slow response.

How many pages did you make per day/practice to get to such a large number of pages?

Usually for a smallish build day it would 3-5 pages. But when starting a new design cycle or building it could be upwards of 10+ pages. Our table of contents shows a little bit of a better description tho.

That is an amazing notebook. My team is VIQ and we had a 400+ page notebook that I thought was pretty good but this beats the socks off what we made. All the detail makes me wonder how many hours you put into it, because my team spent many a night writing out our design process. In conclusion, kudos to you, awesome notebook. :+1:

I’ve noticed that your notebook doesn’t really “X” out space on a page that isn’t used. In your experience do judges prefer if you “X” out unused space or is this something that doesn’t really matter as much as I thought it did.

Rather late & I’m not Peter, but I might be able to (partially) answer this for you.

The idea of 'X’ing out a page, to my knowledge, is to signify to the judges that the page is intentionally left blank. I think that this idea was mostly for physical notebooks and even then, I don’t know if it’s that important. Perhaps a simple “Continues on Next Page” or “Page Intentionally Left Blank” will do the trick.

And as far as what the judges prefer, it’s very hard to determine this as each judge is different. Additionally, not all judges will out-right give their advice to students or even coaches.

I’ve been the notekeeper for 2 seasons now (one IQ, one V5) and I never X’ed out a single blank page or area. I don’t think it has been a problem for me. Get the content of the notebook as excellent as possible before you worry about the nitty-gritty (comparatively) minor aspects of your notebook.

Sorry for the late reply & I agree with what 72837A said. I used to X out every page in my 8th and 9th grade years. Then after that year I learned a lot about notebooking with my teammate who handled it for the next 2 years and she led the decision to stop Xing and we started winning a lot more. Not saying that its bad but doesn’t really matter, that should be the least of your worries when notebooking.

Thank you, hard work pays off :slight_smile:

Hey peter, thx very much for the notebook, I really like the format, it think it works really well, i might try this type of format next season.

I’m not gonna exactly copy it, and I’ll tunable guve you some credit if i use this similar format.

Some major things that i really didn’t do that your team did is reviewing every single match, showing all code, taking a picture of the robot for like every single small step. Also in my notebook, i got a lot of feedback about writing too much on one page, altough i didn’t really understand, because i thought that it might be better since it has more detail. But in your notebook, you use like only bullet points, and all the things are short and concise, and you also kinda like leave a lot of blank space on some pages, which in my opinion makes the notebook look neater and easier to read. I really like it, thx for sharing your notebook.