My mentor was the head judge for FTC and I volunteered a few times at FTC competitions. I feel like the notebook is emphasized more in that competition, and from what I’ve seen and heard, they prefer handwritten engineering notebook. This bias, however, hasn’t prevented an electronic notebook from winning the design award.
I feel like a handwritten notebook makes feeling, personalization, and effort much more obvious. But I also feel its more fragile - too fragile to be practical.
With an electronic notebook, we can change formatting as we please. We can move dates, provide more space if necessary, add photos cleanly, and add any documents without sacrificing any previous work.
For example, we always want to place a bill of materials near the front of the book. However, it’s impossible to predict what materials a team uses at the start of the season. With a written notebook, the bill of materials would typically be a handout, but to me that’s very unprofessional and unorganized. In response to this, teams can prepare beforehand and leave a few pages blank, but I also feel that blank space is downgrading for the first few competitions. From there, teams can mark, saying that this space is used for future documents, but then this goes to the problem of limited space. You cant add pages in a handwritten notebook, and the more you overestimate what you need in a specific area, you sacrifice space for another part of the log book. However, if you underestimate your space by even one page, the notebooks value plummets
Another example would be community outreach. We always want that in the back of the book, with it’s own division. But we can’t predict how many outreach events we’ll have. More than likely, we would of undershot it this year (I didn’t expect to have 21 by our first competition). Thanks to the electronic notebook, we saved ourselves in that section
Another reason why the electronic notebook is so helpful is because multiple people can work on it at the same time. Some people wrote biographies, others input photos, while even more were revising what we currently have.
I believe an electronic notebook is the most practical way to get an amazing result, but with extremely careful planning (in my opinion, too extreme to be applicable), a handwritten notebook can bypass an electronic notebook greatly
When we won the design award on November 16, they said that the biggest thing that divided our notebook from other notebooks was the documented use of CAD. They also said we won by a unanimous decision. I traded notebooks with a team member in GreenBots (these guys would have won if we didn’t attend), and I noticed we both had excellent depth(100+ pages) and personalization, but CAD truly separated the notebooks. In previous seasons, they also said we won the design award due to our excellent display of development from sketches, to CAD, to Prototypes, to Design, to [Modification]