Our students are in the process of deciding how to make the Engineering Notebook for the upcoming year. Last year we combined the records of the design, building and programming of the robot with all kinds of information about our team, like volunteer work, robotics related activities, an experiment the students carried out and fundraising.
This year the students want the Engineering Notebook to be like a professional notebook would be, at least they want to try their best to do that.
So here is my question: if they leave out all the information about the team, how will the judges know about all the other aspects of the team, like mentoring or other ways the team shows commitment to robotics? Those kinds of things are considered for the Excellence award. If it isn’t documented and shared with the judges, how will they know about it?
And yet, it seems there really isn’t a place for that extraneous information in a true Engineering Notebook. It seems the Engineering Notebook should strictly be about the robot.
We are considering making two records. One will be the Engineering Notebook, and one will be the team record book for the year. Do any other teams do that? Would it be appropriate to give both to the judges at competitions?
We have a engineering notebook that solely documents what we do such as our building and programming progress plus team meetings, summaries of our tournaments and a team overviews. For outreach activities, our design method, marketing, and strategies we have separate binders so it is quite normal to have a strict engineering notebook and several specializing binders for other important information.
At tournaments though we only give them our engineering notebook and show them our binders during the meeting and when they come over to our table.