Hey guys! I’d like my team to direct our efforts a little more towards the design award this season, and I have a question about the design award rubric for the engineering notebook, which is the first page located here: . There is one tab on this rubric for the notebook that says Resources. To get the full 3 points in this category, the notebook…“Shows the team’s efficient use of time with an overall project timeline. The team uses checkpoints to help them know how well they are staying on schedule and readjusts their schedule as needed. The notebook illustrates the good use of human resources by assigning members based on their strengths.” Do you guys have any ideas as to how to successfully do this…I’m not quite sure what it means.
I think one way would be a to put like a basic timeline type thing at the beginning of the notebook describing when you plan to finish what.
So basically what my team did last year is that our inner cover had a chart with all of our team members and their “Area of expertise”.
This could be an example of the
For this, you could create a timeline that shows the progress that your team has made by adding significant robot changes to the timeline.
You could make a gantt chart.
But the rubric makes it sound as though this timeline should be updated as you go along, not once you finish. “Uses checkpoints to help them know how well they are staying on schedule and readjusts their schedule as needed.” So should my team just reserve a couple of pages to add to as we go through the season and make changes, or should we just write those changes down clearly as we go along? Also, how should my team take care of that “checkpoints” part? Should we use the season schedule, since it has all of the meets near us for this season, so we can plan accordingly for when the meets are in the season. We think this is a good idea, but what kind of goals should we have by the time each meet arrives. Like, for the first meet, our goal might be to have a successful object manipulator and a base, and then, by the second, we may want to have a fully working hanging mechanism, but what about after that? For the meets after we have our robot put together, should our goals/checkpoints be to lighten weight, improve programs, etc.?
@VexTRex
What you could do is you could have a daily journal part where you update every meeting.
Here, you could write about what you accomplished at the meeting and what changes you will have to make to the robot.
“Should our goals/checkpoints be to lighten weight, improve programs, etc.?”
These are great goals that you could add daily journal portion of the notebook.
Then, the meeting before a tournament, you could compile the important changes of your robot into a timeline.
This timeline would change over the different tournaments that you attend.
Finally, your final timeline (States competition or worlds) could include all the different iterations of your robot.
For example:
Version 1: Dumper bot. 1 Excellence award. 1 Tournament Champion.
Version 2: Claw bot. 1 Tournament Champion.
Version 3: Catapult robot. 1 Tournament runner up. 1 Design Award.
Version 4: Catapult + High Hang robot. 2 Tournament Champion.
You could add pictures and dates to these and create a timeline.
What our team does is we use our competition dates as key dates for the timeline and base other major dates as benchmarks for design completion and evaluation. For example our D and R teams both worked this summer building their initial designs. At the mid point during summer D decided to switch designs, but R decided to keep theirs. At the beginning of school D again decided to switch designs, and R again decided to keep theirs. This Friday marks the halfway point until our first event and surprisingly D is keeping their design while R is switching it up. This Friday is the last day to switch designs until after our first competition, and due to the number of competitions that our teams go to (around 8-12 a year) for the rest of the year we will use each of those events as the timeline benchmarks for major design changes depending on how good everyone else is. Right now I think our D team’s goals are to have around 40-50 for each skills run and have a high scoring (~14 point or more) autonomous.
Below are two examples, one from my NBN notebook, and my current starstruck notebook.
Because I have less access to my robot this year, I setup my timeline planning ahead to my next meetings and what I should get done, along with adding a checkpoint right up to the next competition. If anything needs to be changed, I will tweak it as I go, and then compile everything into another summary as seen in my Nothing but Net example.
In example two, you can see a more basic overview of our time management and how I used our checkpoint at the end. It was updated all the way up to our state competition.
Important things to note as checkpoints, which I kinda did but didn’t emphasize that well, is different iterations of a robot and when you complete the design process, etc…
I hope this helps 
Below is an example from @MartinMaVEXForever 's skyrise notebook
I’ve been updating our team’s design journal weekly since May, I’m close to 7000 words right now. Is that normal >.>
Depending on how often you meet and how often you make design changes, it could potentially even be too little 
We maintain both an online log and a more summarized physical notebook. As long as you can show that you have rigorously documented the design process of your robot, word count doesn’t really matter. If you really want a comparison, though, then I estimate our online log word count to be at something like 10,000+ (~250 words per entry * 1 entry per meeting * 6 meetings per week * 7 weeks of summer)
Dam, that’s pretty insane. Thanks for the info.