Could you guys give some pointers for my notebook? I’m trying to get a bit of a rough draft for the notebook, to hopefully have a decent one. It’s still a work in progress, only a few “sections” in. Thanks.
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Pictures are your friend
While the notebook is “for you”. Think of it as “if someone just joined my team would reading this get them up to speed?”
Draw the readers eye to the important content. A judge has a lot of notebooks and limited time. Make it easy for them to see that your notebook meets the Notebook Rubric requirements
I think @9MotorGang has a discord that offers tips and reviews of notebooks
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I would recommend doing your notebook in Google slides
Then come back to the forum with your notebook with pictures and material.
It’s pretty hard to judge a notebook by an outline
Overall, not a bad start. I would rank your identify the problem as proficient so far. As Mentor_355U stated, you definitely need more pictures as the rubric specifically staes: “Identifies the game and robot design challenges in detail at the start of each design process cycle with words and pictures”. Also, there is a lot of just stating rules with no analysis which isn’t great, and the format is quite bland. If you are interested in joining the robot notebookers discord server I am sure there are plenty of other experienced students and judges who would be willing to take a look.
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thank you so much! this helps quite a bit!! <3
Your content in itself is pretty good, but to be brutally honest, judges aren’t going to like the way it’s formatted. Here’s some tips and best of luck this season!
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Praise the VEX notebook rubric (found here). The rubric details everything your notebook needs to win awards, I can’t stress that enough. I’d highly recommend even adding it to the start or end of your notebook. I’ve noticed that your notebook draft is missing a Table of Contents, and the rubric says you should have one, so I’d add that before you start anything else.
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Rename your section titles to be more simple. An example would be renaming the first section “Introduction to the Game” to “Game Analysis” or something more simple and smooth. Also, you should organize your notebook in chronological order. Label each page with the general section it’d be added to, but I’d say divide your notebook by month and put it all in chronological order.
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Switch to a different platform. Google Docs is a great tool to use for basic planning, like super rough drafting, but for the real deal I’d highly recommend switching to Google Slides, Powerpoint, or Canva. VEX provides some templates for Google Slides and Powerpoint here.
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Introduce your team in the start. After the ToC, I’d say add a little blurb for every member of your team and list their roles. Then after all of that, start the actual notebook.
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Add plenty of pictures. @Mentor_355U actually already mentioned that and it’s good advice.
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Separate all of your content by page. If you’re branching off to a new idea, make a whole new page for it. I especially recommend you to do that when you’re switching sections.
An example provided by VEX that I really like is this notebook. It is a physical notebook, but it has pretty good general formatting.
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I would recommend teams look at this previous post about Engineering Notebook experience and support material that 1469A used over many seasons…
also look up 515R YouTube video about their documentation process and accompanying notebook.
Lots to learn from teams on this forum about best practices for documentation…
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thank you, I planned on doing a bit of edits/adding pictures when I put it in the physical notebook. the example notebook helps a lot