I would like to have sections in the notebook for each mechinish (drivetrain, intake code…), but the entire notebook would not be in chronological order, but each section would be. Would this be disallowed or have points marked off? Having the notebook in sections would help with organizing the notebook and would increase readabillity.
In the Engineering Notebook Rubric, check out Useability and Completeness, and Notebook Format. Also make sure that it still shows independent inquiry (Innovation/Originality)
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The entries in each sections would still be in chronological order. This would be done to help catorgize the notebook. So you think that doing this would deduct me points from the rubric?
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Based on my team’s experience last year: using sections like that is perfectly fine as long as the Table of Contents and the entries within each section are chronological. In fact, the Digital Notebook Template Instructions provided by VEX give this example.
My one suggestion would be to number pages on a per-section basis with some sort of prefix so you don’t have to constantly re-number your pages. For example, we had sections for Team Organization (T), Strategy & Gameplay (S), Design & Build (D), and Electronics & Programming (E), so pages within the sections were numbered T1, T2, T3; S1, S2, S3; etc but the ToC would go something like T1, T2, S1, S2, D1, E1, T3…
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We have an engineering notebook with the pages already numbered. How would we acheive this? Could we have sections dedicated to each mechnism (pp.1 - 13: Introduction, pp.14 - 28: drivetrain, pp. 29 - 38: intake …)?
I’m not quite sure I follow you there. Have you started a notebook that wasn’t organized by sections, but now you want to re-organize it? In that case, I’d suggest simply re-numbering your pages once you’ve decided on your section organization, and then re-ordering the pages appropriately. This is obviously easiest with a Digital Notebook, and similarly easy if you’re using something like a 3-ring binder for a physically maintained notebook. If you’re using a bound physical notebook (as used to be required), I wouldn’t suggest doing the section-based organization, but might instead do a supplemental Table of Contents that calls things out by Mechanism.
If you are using sections, how you break them up would be totally up to you. If your main break-down is by mechanism, it’s probably worth remembering that there are things that you’d need in your notebook in order to be successful that aren’t tied to a particular mechanism, or even to the robot as a whole, so you’ll need to have sections to account for those items as well.
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This is a great idea! I wish I could mark 2 solutions! I only have the introductions of the notebook (team bios, game rules…) and have been waiting for an answer for this. Thank you!
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