This is a posting of the documentation that we created last year that won us the design award at worlds last year. Part of the purpose of our club is to improve not only our own engineering skills, but also those of other vex teams across the world.
Included are our Requirements Document, our Design Document, a short presentation that we gave to the design award judges at worlds, and a design memo that we leave with judges to give a quick, concise recap of what our team is and does.
We encourage the use of these documents, especially the design and requirements documents as they are standard in the engineering field. Following is a description of the purpose of each document.
Requirements Document - States what the system shall and should do in order to be considered an acceptable product. These requirements include both Vex game rules and team requirements that we decided upon as a team.
Design Document - The purpose of the design document is to lay out the team’s designs for each subsystem, including variations as the system evolves. The document also includes our system for determining which design to use. The last part of the design document is the testing and verification section where we determine through both physical experimentation and mathematical analysis whether each subsystem fulfills each requirement put forth in the requirements document.
Presentation - This is a short presentation we gave to the design judges at worlds to attempt to control the discussion and highlight what we choose about the robot, while providing answers for the more generic questions such as “What does your robot do?”
Here is another presentation we use at local tournaments. The judging sessions tend to run a bit longer than they do at worlds. This goes into a little bit more depth on our analysis. Colorado Championships.pdf (612 KB)
Thank you for your post. I have a team of 7, but only 2 are interested in programming or construction, and this will help me give the others an opportunity to contribute.
Can you share with us how you maintained daily documentation using an engineering notebook? Can you share example entries? My team has a hard time determining what needs to be documented daily.
Thank you for sharing your Engineering Notebook. We are a middle school team that qualified and attended the World Championship last year and had a wonderful experience. Congratulations on winning the Design Award! Your willingness to share your knowledge is appreciated as the Engineering Notebook is a challenging endeavor that we have yet to master! Good luck this season!
Sorry for the delayed response for all the questions. For our design notebook, we always use a bound notebook like the one pictured. This year, we have gone up to one larger in size to more easily accommodate 8.5x11 paper. We start the book off with several pages set aside for a table of contents which we fill out before competitions but dont update daily. On each page, we put a number in the top outside corner for reference in the table of contents. We also date and initial every page. If an item is taped in, we either cut it down to size or fold it and tape it such that it can be folded out. Any blank space that we have, we cross out or hash out so that it is clear later that we didnt miss anything there. Actual content ranges from daily notes, analysis, notes from lessons or books and really anything else that contributes to the design process. We also tabulated a few pages that we wanted to point out to judges on important pieces of analysis, etc. Hope this helps, Id be happy to post more pages if teams are interested.
