I am a 4th year VRC Competitor and didn’t qualify for worlds this year. In the off season me and my team have decided to start working on general autonomous strategy and building techniques to prepare us for next season. We wanted to document this in our engineering notebook but aren’t sure if we should start our 2023-24 season notebook now.
Is there anything in the game manual that prevents this? No right? So it’s not illegal! If you wanna do it, do it!
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Before you start your notebook, get a copy of this year’s rubric. Read the rubric in detail. Get the Judges guide. Read everything that the JUDGES are going to read in their judges guide.
And then make your notebook following the judges guide and the rubric. Make sure you cover ALL of the rows in the rubric in every daily entries in your notebook. It is almost impossible to have too much attention to detail or too much information in the notebook.
Good luck with next season!
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I would encourage it, you have time to reflect about what went right and what can be improved as a team from this past season and develop solutions to your organization and project planning that are not game specific.
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My team didn’t make it into Worlds either, but over the season we had amazing notebooks (4 notebooks) and won Innovate, Excellence, and Design awards! We did start the notebooks early.
So yes! I’d just wait until the season has been announced!
Hopefully this helps!
definitely dont start now. start around maybe september or something, maybe august. Theres technically no “correct” time to start. But if they see that you’re already putting daily entries in July, thats a red flag for the judges. Maybe put one entry in the notebook for the day that the game is released, then maybe an entry for every month. Obviously those might be really long entries, but its better than writing a much shorter entry every day. Just make sure you know what youve done in that time.
The notebook should start whenever you start working. There was always a “pre-season” section of my notebook just to show general stuff we worked on before the game reveal.
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If you are 100% positive your team won’t have any major member changes next season, I’d say start now. If not, documenting is still a very useful tool even if you aren’t writing in your “official” notebook. It’s a great to get into the habit of documenting your work, and practicing logging data helps refine yoru abilities. In my opinion, I’d start the offical notebook as soon as the game manual releases to have “Identify the Challenge” as your first log.
TLDR: Take notes, but I’d wait to write in the notebook until you can start with the first step of the VEX Design Process (Linked in judges guide)
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I started my note book as soon as the new game dropped and docume ted our full procces and analysos since day 1. There is no harm in finding techniques and other things to strart working for next year. A big tip i would recommend is look ad the way proffesional engineers document and make desisions on their desighns so that you pick and show how your robot is the ideal desighn based on your outlined criteria.
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Yep. I’ve reviewed many notebooks that document what was done, but leave out the method of making the decision. If you want to make your EN stand out, then spotlight things like a decision matrix, or even better, a series of tests. Too many students just ask on the forum “what’s best” and build that…but what’s better if you want to earn design/excellence is to test various options on your own.
…then, for maximum points (which are received by the reviewing judge being able to find everything), build your EN in the order described by the rubric…makes it simple for the judge to give points.
Another area missed by most teams. Even before the game is released, you can plan your year, perhaps with a Gantt chart. Sometime I’ve looked through notebooks just looking for anything resembling schedule planning to award some points on the rubric.
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Just curious. Why is this a red flag?
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the judges where you are might be different on how they, yknow, judge, but this is what they told me: the way they judge the books is all dependent on how well you describe your robot. Basically, if you can recreate the robot just by looking in the book, its usually a very good notebook. If you start building your robot during that time in like April-july, some judges will see it as starting too early, and make the notebook lose points because of it. It has something to do with the section where there is no robot and its just talking about strategies taking up too much space in the notebook.
The scoring method that the judges use for the engineering notebook is very specific, and laid out in the rubric, which is available here: https://kb.roboticseducation.org/hc/en-us/articles/4461349729047-Judging-Resource-Engineering-Notebook-Rubric
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You are clearly wrong. The design process starts as soon as the game is announced. Lots of research is done by looking at Ri3D videos, reading forums, etc.
So April 17th is the day the game cycle starts.
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This is bad advice in my opinion… I have teams in three different categories right now… teams that didn’t qualify for states (now working on prototypes of different chassis designs) … Team that went to states and didn’t qualify for worlds (again already thinking and prototyping different designs and coming up with a better ways for the team to be prepared for when the game is released) and teams going to worlds… still building and doing modifications to their bots). The first two will be documenting their process leading up to the game unveil which will be in their 2023-2024 season notebook… The later teams going to worlds will start their notebooks entry with the game unveil and proceed forward. All three scenarios will have things they would like to enter in their books over the summer. So my take is that is never too early to start your notebook!
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Starting a notebook in July is a must if you are working on anything over the summer. Many teams do work on robots over the summer. This was the bot I had at the end of July. And to go with it we had about 60 pages in the notebook.
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Now you have to post an “after” picture of the robot today 
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I agree with James - As soon as your season is over, maybe take a short break but then start the Engineering Design Process all over again and iterate your ideas from this year. As soon as the new challenge is released the new season begins!
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Work in progress! Thanks for sharing… we’re never where we really want to be in terms of builds.
Problem solving!
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