I need suggestions on an engineering notebook, who has suggestions that has won excellence?
Can you be more specific?
never got any awards, but I always try and put detailed sketches, and draw out pieces from every step of the design process in our book.
The REC Foundation has a good engineering notebook example on their website. It can be found here: https://www.roboticseducation.org/documents/2016/11/vrc-engineering-notebook-team-1575a.pdf
I won an excellence award this year so if you need specific questions answered then I can help you.
I would suggest following this rubric and making sure that everything on here is in your notebook. We followed this basically to a T last year and won 3 Excellence Awards.
I have a few tips:
- Don’t forget about it. You will.
- You won’t want to do it. Still do it.
- Log everything. Diagrams are the most useful.
- Make it understandable. Technical terms are helpful but make it not a ten chapter biography.
- Get friends and/or family/guardians to review it. They don’t have to be an engineer to understand it. If it’s good, anybody will understand it.
As excellence winners, we would recommend prototyping all designs and following the design process before picking a final design. Evaluating each design and explaining your reason for everything is critical. In addition, I would recommend being as specific as possible in the build process. The judges want to be able to recreate the build process so they would be able to do it themselves. Hope that helps!
This ^^. That’s exactly what we do and we won the Design Award in our division at Worlds last year.