how do you guys improve your notebook.
Some tips I use to help improve my notebook:
- Drawings: I am pretty sure the judges don’t want to read an essay about what happened. Also, drawings can help people understand what you are writing about.
- Charts and Tables: Charts and Tables can help you organize information.
- Summarize: No one wants to read a 10 paragraph essay.
This is a very wide and unspecified question…
I assume that you mean something like “what is dome to make your notebook better in a certain way?”
Now I don’t know the ways you may mean but I’ll break it up.
Aesthetically pleasing
For our team, we chose to make our notebook aesthetically pleasing by picking a base color (#6a4e80ff for us) and then putting it through this website called HTML Color codes, which you can click on harmony- and then select one of the options. I opt for the analogous colors as they usually look nicer together. However, it depends on the color, just test out to see what you like. Then, once I’ve selected background and border colors from the website, I push myself to try and avoid the normal “black words on any background” or “trying something new with using bright yellow/red/blue as my text!” and use something that feels bright to the color yet nice. If you can’t tell what looks nice and what doesn’t, then ask other people what is readable yet looks nice. We personally used a silver-like color.
Formatting: Keep most of your formatting the same… I don’t like flipping through notebooks to see the titles move halfway across the screen, the font totally different, colors different… Y’know? Just try to keep things consistent and organized!
Daily logging
Each person doesn’t need to do a log- but I make sure that each person does in my team. People must participate in the notebook process and daily logging should be the easiest part of participating.
The way that I get my whole team is by incorporating a time in our sessions (10 minutes) to just pour what we did into something. Later somebody can put it back into the notebook if it wasn’t written on the notebook.
Finding ways to incorporate design process
I like to use a few phrases to figure out really what we did today, STEAM (but not the normal one)
Solved problems
Trialed and errored it out
Effectively communicated
Actively participated and helped
Mentally persevered when times weren’t as planned
Then log and speak of how you possess these traits and explain how they connect to whatever step of the design process 
Happy notebooking
my dad is an engineer. We use the plan, do, cheek, act, for our notebook. first we come up with a plan. After we have a plan we would actually do the plan. when we are wrapping up we cheek if we did our plan and our act is what we’ll do next time
We document everything. Down to the second.
This is really good advice, I sent this to our team’s notebooker
Don’t just tell your building/designing steps. Incorporate why you did something. Talk about what you considered and why you didn’t choose it. Document failures and tests as well.
You want your notebook to be where a judge could easily replicate the Robot, but you also want to explain how you came to that conclusion.
You also need to credit everything that isn’t original. Crediting is huge. It shows where you got inspiration from. Every engineer who creates something takes some sort of inspiration from others. It’s how we learn and find our own style.
Additionally, please don’t spend a lot of time (if any) worrying about decoration or extrenuous content. If it doesn’t tie in with developing the actual systems within the Robot, then you shouldn’t be spending a lot of time documenting it. We made that mistake once documenting way too much design on 3d printed decorations. It’s not going to count towards how the Robot performs, so why spend the most time on it?
Anyway, sorry this is long. Just some things I wish I knew before starting my first year. Happy documenting
Depends. Online or physical copy?
Hi @luka, of course!
First and foremost, i really do agree with what others have been saying on this thread. Please do make sure to follow up on these tips.
Second, you can check out related topics on notebooking. There are so many threads on the forum about notebook tips that it’s simply brilliant.
I attached some of these below:
To add on, make sure to check out award-winning notebook examples easily found on the forum! 515R’s, for example, for Spin Up, is particularly brilliant.
Oh, and at the utmost importance, PLEASE use the rubric provided on the REC Library. I am astounded that so many teams miss out on this opportunity. The rubric is what you will be scored on, and what really decides your success. Don’t just look at advice from others (I mean, it is helpful but) because that’s not all. There is a rubric that you have to be scored on.
This is the rubric:
https://kb.roboticseducation.org/hc/en-us/articles/4461349729047-Judging-Resource-Engineering-Notebook-Rubric
This is the Engineering Notebook Judging section:
https://kb.roboticseducation.org/hc/en-us/articles/4969763478167-Guide-to-Judging-Judging-Engineering-Notebooks
Other than that, others have also been very helpful. Good luck, and if you have any other questions, please LMK!
Truly thank you for sending the notebook rubric. this is an absolute cheat code for the notebook and this will help us out greatly.