So I started a team at my school 2 years ago and we have only had 1 team each year until this year. We now have 30 people so we need about 3 teams, but I haven’t put people on different teams yet and we have been meeting since the beginning of the summer. How is the engineering notebook suppose to look like for each team if we have been doing everything together?
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Well, generally teams write a new notebook series for each season. So if the team split makes the start of the new season for you, then you don’t really need to refer to past years heavily.
Otherwise, I would talk about who was in the team, what you did up to that point, then say in the notebook: the team was too big, so we split into 3.
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While teams are being defined, encourage all members to maintain individual journals. It allows them to brainstorm ideas and then later share those ideas with yet to be determined teams.
Journals can be a valuable part of the design process for large teams.
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Honestly, I would have each individual team create an engineering notebook for this season. The main challenge though, is going to be finding a way to explain not being on designated teams over the summer. Explaining the shared designs is going to be a bit easier, and I have most certainly seen teams with award winning notebooks in past seasons work with multiple teams on a singular design.
Like Lascap said, having each team member keep their own notebook/journal is a good idea, but make sure to combine all of the info into one central notebook (so it’s easier to read and submit for judging). If y’all need help on the specifics of an engineering notebook, several past ones have been posted/linked here on the forums as community resources.
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off topic
You mentioned 30 people on 3 teams. I think that 10 per team is too many and people will end up not doong anything. 4-5 is more the number to shoot for imo…
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Yep. @Robo_Chicken has this here. 3-5 roboteers per robot. Easy way to see this is to grab two 6 packs of soda, stack them and then everyone put two hands on the robot. Much like Thanksgiving and getting access to the turkey.
Notebook for each team, but they can cross reference "We met as a group, team ‘A’ had a great idea for a drivetrain, Team ‘C’ has a claw that we can improve. Always give references back to where the ideas came from (hey NoCal teams, I have two that mention your robot)
We don’t want robot clones, but everyone starts from the clawbot and diverges from there. (we are looking for that divergence / iteration)
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I understand the concern but for my team, groups of 10 work better so people aren’t doubling up on jobs. Most people on my robotics team are not too into this stuff. Only 4 people(including myself) so far really love doing it and will spend lots of extra time for the robotics team. So having 10 on the team just means for us that when someone can’t work on the robot then some else will.
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When my numbers exploded and we split in to multiple teams, my students did do everything together at the beginning of the season. We selected a group of team captains that were responsible for each robot’s notebook from the beginning. The rest of the students were divided later, with those captains continuing to take the lead for each robot.
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