Hey! I’m the notebooker for 6546W; recently winning excellence and going to worlds. This is a big notebooking mistake I’ve seen; if you are able to fix it, you will be able to not only add more quantity, but also quality.
Now, the thing that everyone is doing wrong: Summarizing what you have done over a period of time.
In a lot of notebooks, I see people saying: “Oh what we have done over x date to y date.”
They normally also just spam in a bunch of photos, and little writing. This is wrong. You should individually notebook each add on. For example, this is what you shouldn’t do
From april 19 to april 29, we added an extender, choo-choo, and intake to help our bot.
Instead go in depth for each slide. Say how you built it, and how it will help, record all iterations also add diagrams for fun!
This helps you on the part “a person that doesn’t know vex can recreate the project” getting more points for your notebook!
Hmmmm; extra detail is fine, a Whole page is fine but don’t squeeze everything in one slide. Feel free to add extra slides for more photos or words. Just don’t be redundant and repeat the same things over and over again!
I’m not sure, I’ve heard that they just look at a few pages of each notebook to decide which ones are developed, and then look into them a bit more. I would try to keep a consistientcy throughout the notebook so the judges don’t onlt see the poorly written entries.
To anyone who is a judge, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
As we get to the end of the season, States and Worlds, I’ll point out that once the notebook is “fully developed” it’s the interview where the judges will make their award decisions. It’s not uncommon at worlds for three or four notebooks per division to have “perfect” scores on the rubric…so the interview is where the award decision is made.
Furthermore, the formula used to determine the world’s excellence award includes being nominated for several judged awards…and these nominations are made by the judges in the online interview. Those teams who get nominated in the online interviews are the ones who get in-person second interviews at worlds.
You can use Vex IQ CAD. I like LDcad for vex IQ, but there is also an official cad: Snapcad.
Snapcad lets you make “instructions” to build your design, but LDcad is more user-friendly and easier to control.
I would like to add that labeling your table of contents is one of the BIGGEST things that I see teams not do. If you label your ToC to show each step of the Engineering Design Process, it makes the Judges’ jobs a lot easier to give you points!
