For the past three years of participating in VRC I have been typing my notebook. I put a lot of effort into it and work hard to describe the engineering process in as much detail as I can. This past competition I went to my team didn't get an interview because they picked the top five notebooks and only interviewed them. I decided that with this new bound notebook bonus that I would need to change to a bound notebook. I have a lot of extra pages before the actual meetings section of our notebook. Looking at the criteria between an engineering notebook and a team journal I believe the pages I added should be a part of the engineering notebook. I have sections that I will be needing to add more information as the year progresses. I was wondering how teams take that into consideration and how to work around having to add more pages while not knowing how many pages I will be adding.
I’m not sure I’d use that comp as the baseline for how tournaments will be run this year. 323Y didn’t get an interview either and they won experience at Park Tudor the week before.
The organizers also awarded a “home” team the design award and they were ranked really low.
I’m not saying there was funny buisness going on there, but it seemed kinda sketch
Design award does not imply high performing robot. Read the rubric for the notebook and interview, it is about the process.
I’ve seen high performing robots not submit a notebook at all. This precludes them from Excellence Award at events.
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I’m not disagreeing with the judges and their decisions. I didn’t see the notebooks or interviews of those teams. All I know is how I can improve my team’s notebook and interview.
I’m fully aware of this, I’m not saying they had poor process/didn’t deserve it. Just a casual observation that several of the teams that were contenders in past competitions were not interviewed and a “home” team ranked in the middle 20’s was awarded a judged award.
There’s not enough evidence to make any sort of indictment of the judges, it just raised my and several other mentor’s eyebrows.
We weren’t even there competing, i was just taking notes on their process to better prepare for our tournament later this year, so it is not as if our team was even personally effected. I just made some notes that the judging process was a little suspect, and I’d hate to see a team go through a lot of extra work over one events outcome.
I think the rationale behind how they are defining the engineering notebook is that you don’t add pages later. You document as you go.
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