How much time is your team wasting on notebook formatting?

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
1

How much time did you spend on the actual write-up vs. just fixing the layout/formatting for the notebook?

2

I am a mentor, so I am speaking for what I see my teams do, not from personal experience. My newer teams tend to mostly use the Google Slides notebook template slides that are published by RECF. My more advanced teams like to have more personalized content, so they create their own templates for common notebook pages (team meetings, build logs, programming logs, testing logs, post-competition meetings, etc). They spend about the first week creating these templates, then reuse them as needed throughout the season. Because these templates are purposefully built to meet their own style, they spend very little time formatting the notebook.

3

I spent like 20 minutes on the format and layout stuff and a few months actually writing.

4

Hey @EpicEngine, welcome to the forum!

I spend way more time than I need on fixing notebook formatting :slight_smile: .

It takes me around ~15 minutes to first write up the entry. Then I spend around 30 minutes correcting everything-

And we don’t talk about the time I spent at the beginning of the season when I first created our notebook and the basic template

5

Formating for us took like 2 - 1 hrs while writing took us like 20-16 hrs

6

I just work on it as I update the notebook, it’s not like I devote a ton of extra time to it.

But…
Your note book should be formatted in a way that is intuitive to look though, and outline the steps of the engineering design process.

This incudes having a clear table of contents, and labeling the steps of the engineering design process.

7

Welcome to VEX forum! My team just made some templates at the start of the year and then after that we spent like 10 min on write-up and 2 on formatting each day.

8

I don’t have numbers for you, but I do have a priority list (not necessarily fully objective):

  1. Legibility&Clarity - Especially if it is a physical notebook, the notebook needs to be easy to read. The notebook should also avoid stumping the judges about what you are trying to say with any confusing or unspecified wording (explain any jargon you may be using).
  2. Content&Flow - More diagrams and explanations, as relevant, will always trump something like a color scheme (unless the color scheme makes the notebook hard to read). This also plays into legibility, but the notebook should make it very clear what steps you took in creating your robot.
  3. Length - This is not to say that you should cram things into a reduced number of pages, but it is good to avoid too much redundancy (Note: Some redundancy can still be good).
  4. Looks - This is the coloring and extra things, but specifically components which aren’t there to improve legibility.
9

I do IQ, and I personally spend my time notebooking like this:
5-10 minutes formatting
10-15 minutes writing
20-30 minutes figuring out what to write.