Notebook Judging Questions

Hi, Jamil from 10863A here, I was wondering if any teams had suggestions on how to effectivley make our notebook be sufficient in fuffiling the job as an instruction manual to allow judges to fully recreate our robotics seoson. Just reaching out in search of any teams who have won any notebooking awards and have strong suggestions on making our notebook into something along the lines of an ultimate vex robotics instruction manual. I was also wondering what teams found to be the best solution to balancing team members and entries. The team is a pretty large group in term of varrying personalities and as the teams notebooker my biggest concerns are consistency and unformity in the notebook, how can I maintain this.

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hi jamil from 10863A! so, you’re concerned about your team’s engineering notebook. i’ll address each of your concerns one by one. the stuff below helped my older team win many notebook-based awards last year.

as you know, a chunk of the engineering notebook rubric is that the judges must be able to recreate your team’s full history based off your notebook alone. you may be thinking of ways for your notebook to be a sufficient replacement for an instructions manual.

honestly, i literally made an actual instruction manual embedded in the notebook’s pages itself. as the builders would build, i would sit next to them and take photos as they build. then, i would write down the steps. when i had time, i would format everything into the actual manual. look at the vex hero bot build manuals for inspiration.

if that is not possible for you, i would look back at the CAD of your team’s robot. if you are using onshape to CAD (one of my favorites), you can hide certain parts as you need to do step by step. the builders are also there to help you (since they built the literal robot). they can guide you as you go along. as for making the actual instructions manual, i would either draw it out or take screenshots while including steps. do not forget to include the required parts and many orthographic views so the reader can clearly understand it.

for your teammates’ varying personalities and styles… you can’t really do anything about your teammates when it comes to how they notebook themselves. unless if you teach them of course, but depending on the people, it can be grueling to do so haha.

my thoughts on this, it’s probably your job to format everything consistently. as main notebooker. you organize the way information flows in the notebook. 99% of the time, i get the builders and programmers on my team to notebook pages using their own methods, and i would reorganize the pages to my liking.

finally, i have a to-do list every day for pages, and i just assign my teammmates the same amount of pages to do. that way, they each do their share of notebook.

hope this helps! :>

best wishes to you and your team!

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Does anybody know if you can see your notebook scores after the competition? This would help teams learn on what parts to grow in.

no. This is very illegal. All judging materials must be destroyed after the competition. We literally burned ours in a fire pit afterwards.

This is expressly forbidden under the Confidentiality section of the Guide to Judging. If you have some free time I’d highly recommend that you look through this.

Short answer - no.

The judging process is completely confidential. Any documents are shredded.

You should consult the Guide to Judging to understand the process more clearly.

No. But if you ask some parents/teachers/coaches to evaluate your EN against the rubric, you’ll know your score within about 5 points of what the judges determine.

Be sure you practice interviewing skills, too. The Judge’s deliberations are significantly influenced by the interview.

Judging rubrics are confidential and must be destroyed after the competition, according to the Guide to Judging.

Here is a topic that may explain more.

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