Hi! This season is my first season doing the engineering notebook and going to competitions in general, when we first started building our robot I didn’t exactly know how to document so I didn’t do them, and now all of the beginning pages are blank ,and the whole notebook is very inconsistent in general. Our first competition is on January 13 and I am so stressed trying to figure out what to do. Please help!
Documentation is hard to be sure. Moreover, it is not a single person’s responsibility to make a good documentation of the whole robot/season. It is a team effort. A documentation manager is probably the best description for an effective team - they are there to help the whole team to do their best to document their portion of the robot development. If one team member fails to contribute, really not your failure, it is their problem. As a team, everyone should pitch in to help everyone succeed, even in off days. (ok weeks 
). So, don’t stress! you are doing the best job helping the team be their best!
I would use this topic and feedback from this community to recalibrate - in your notebook document where you are now - and define the problem you are trying to solve - how to make a better notebook. Use the feedback you will get here as brainstorming ideas (note - credit the teams that are helping you move forward!). Next come up with a plan to do better and communicate to your teammates on how to do better job in everyone on team contributing to documentation of your team’s creation - every member should be proud of their contribution and every member of the team should celebrate the team’s growth for all contributions large or small.
From a practical matter of what should be in notebook that is a group effort - it should reflect your team’s journey in creating the robot, strategy, code, and frankly everything that makes your team grow every competition.
If you are looking for an awesome team video describing their documentation process - I would look at 515R’s YouTube video describing their notebook and process.
You will find a lot of helpful teams on this forum to point you to their journey as to what works.
Your team is fortunate to have someone who cares to get it right. Don’t stress - you got this!
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Okay,I have another question, do u think it would be better for me to just have a date skip from the days that I didn’t document, or would it be better for me to fill them up even if some of the information on the pages wasn’t 100% true. I have gotten more of the teams help on the notebook, but I still haven’t figured out what to do in terms of the empty pages.
what is important is to document your design and build thoroughly so someone else can reproduce your robot. Best practice is to put entries in order that the robot was developed. Having dates on the page indicating when the entry was made, and in the main body of the text indicate when the work was done. So a real world example might look like:
“Over the December break, Debbie and I linked the motors of the drive train together using gears to aid with the robot going over the barriers. …” or "During the weekend, … "
Setting the context of when the work was done is legit.
If you are really far behind, “one thing we took away from the last tournament was to have a strong notebook structure. Moving forward, here is the process in which the team will document the robot’s development … The next section will cover the work between that competition and today.”
It is ok not to be perfect from day 1 of the season. It is ok to reflect on missteps and actions to take to be better at engineering. It is a learning process.
Best
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