I teach a Principles of Robotics course at my school. Throughout the class, we complete several projects (obviously), and I have my students keep an engineering notebook for the duration of the class. Our final project in the class is building for the VRC Competition (for those who are interested in joining the robotics club; we have alternatives for those who are not). Essentially, the class transitions into a competition team(s).
This year, more so than previous years, I have several students who truly enjoy and have taken great pride in their documentation for the class. It got me wondering, when we start preparing for competition, if they could just continue in the notebook that they have been working in? But then I wondered whether or not judges would appreciate/tolerate skipping the first several pages to get to the actual competition portion of the notebook. In the past, we have always started with a new notebook, but do we need to?
Any judges care to weigh in here? Not that it is really consequential either way, more curiosity than anything. Thanks.
The Judges need to quickly/easily evaluate the EN against the scoring rubric, so being able to find the items in the Rubric quickly/easily is a plus. If the extra material in the front is neat and impressive, it may give the judges a better overall impression as they score the notebook. In this case, I would recommend that the notebook has an index in the front, or has index tabs, to make it easier to score. Tabs that correspond to each item in the rubric would be a plus and would help ensure that nothing gets missed.
As Kmmohn said, the judges have a very limited amount of time to go over each notebook. Thus it is vital that your teams’ notebooks are easy to navigate and score. In my opinion, it would be better to have a separate notebook for their class assignments and their VRC teams (for simplicity and ease of reading). This will keep their documentation more organized and will allow you to have access to their class notebooks as they are competing in VRC. If their 1st notebook is detailed and readable enough, then your teams may want to consider including it with their other notebook for judging. If your teams cannot maintain separate notebooks, then a tabbing or indexing system would suffice.