So, I’ve been thinking: Our coaches tell us an insane variety of rules that apply to the engineering notebook…
For example:
We have to write in ALL CAPS
We have to write in blue or black ink
We have to have a report for each and every single day
We’re not allowed to type up reports; only print in blue/black ink pen
I’m wondering if these are really, actually VEX rules. If they’re not, can they gut us more points on the rubric, or a higher chance at the engineering notebook award?
Another thing is, I’m part of my school’s robotics team. A few people from my school, however, are on private teams (traitors). When I ask them about this topic, they tell me they don’t have such rules, and that they certainly wouldn’t bother even attempting to follow them.
Here is the rubric for the design award. I would not discount what your mentors think is best for your team, but they are not official VEX rules. Many companies, especially research, crime, and pharmaceutical labs, have very strict lab notebook requirements. I would add that corrections are made, in ink, by a single line through the mistake, with initials and date, for some of the places I have worked. I have seen both handwritten and typed notebooks at Worlds. As a judge, I liked to see the handwritten backup to a typed notebook.
There are no VEX rules whatsoever about how teams should make their engineering notebook. However, you should keep the rubric in mind when making your notebook, as that’s what you will be judged by.
Personally, our team does write in black ink and our notebook is all handwritten. However, writing in caps hasn’t been a rule for us. Also, it is desired to account for each and every day of your progress, but if you record frequently about everything, I think it should be fine. This is how our notebooks are written but I also advise to listen to your mentor and follow the design rubric as best as possible.
I always prefer typed notebooks. The days of industry standards for handwritten notebooks has long passed. Everything people do in college and in career will be typed.
If you go to Worlds, I recommend that you include hand-written notes in the appendix of a typed notebook, which provides some evidence to the judges reviewing the notebook that the work is original and done throughout the season.
Of course. I was using hyperbole. But it’s already heavily on the decline and in 10 years by the time people on this forum are really in industry it will be incredibly rare to see handwritten notebooks.
Prepare people for the world of tomorrow not the world of today, sorta thing.
agreed on preparing for future, but with all the multimodal interfaces and brain implants we have developed in the last forty years, typing is going to be thought to be more old school that hand writing
I don’t see how this would prove or even reaffirm that the notebook was kept up throughout the season. You could just as well write everything right before a competition as you could type it, and I bet plenty of teams do just that.
You could indeed. But teams that keep a hand written engineering notebook often have different pens at sessions and sometimes different people. Which can be forged in the two hours before an event by three people with 5 different writing instruments. Pro tip, have someone use their left hand. (*)
Far easier to just take the notes as you go. This is a classic case of it’s much easier to do it right to start with.
(*) Not really a Pro Tip, but pointing out the absurdity.
Hmm, is this something that judges look for to detect forged notebooks? In my notebook, I always use the same kind of pen for the sake of uniformity, even though I don’t “cheat.”
@Jackets STEAM Team – maybe?, maybe not? Maybe they rely on the RECF supplied Carbon dating unit? Ever noticed that a small corner of one of your pages is missing after an event?
One of my teams has a Pilot G2 Pro that they use for all the pages in their notebook. So they look all the same.
Just keep the notebook, write in it every session, don’t over think it.
The notebooks are collected and reviewed by teams of judges on the first day, and they are rated (scored) against the design ruburic (which I posted a link to back on November 4). The rating against the rubrics is for content, and non-biased against typed or handwritten, unless illegible.
Not every team will be interviewed for the design award, the design-award judging teams (usually teams of 2 judges each) carefully review the top scoring notebooks, then decide which teams to interview. It is at this point that a suspicious notebook (one that looks like it was desktop-published by an English-major-mentor) would be given extra scrutiny, and based on my experience, is pretty easy to figure out during the team interview. But as I said before, including various individuals hand-written notes in an appendix really help reduce the questions judges might have.
Are you sure not every team will be interviewed?
Last year, the judges put a sticker on our banner after the interview and it seemed like most teams had the sticker too.
Every team was interviewed for the awards like “Amaze” and “Think” (and got stickers for to help the judges to keep track), but we only interviewed half a dozen in each division for the Design award. This was a separate interview from the regular interview.