My team lost by one point on the Design Journal, and are curious what other teams put in their design journal that they see as different or special to other teams.
My team won the Design Award the other day at our first tournament, and we were told that what set our team apart from the others was a pre-tournament analysis in our notebook. We pretty much just summed up how our robot was working or not working before the tournament, what we were going to do during the tournament to fix it, what our strategy/plan was during the tournament and what our expectations were. The other reasons the judges said that we won, include:
-Having a well-performing robot, with a good hanging design that was reliable and consistent.
-Having a wonderful interview and presentation of the robot (as well as an Autodesk version of our robot).
-Having great sportsmanship out on the field.
-Overall, they were just really impressed by our interview, notebook and robot performance.
Our notebook had:
-Team intro
-Game intro, and description
-Game strategies
-Goals
-Brainstorming ideas with diagrams
-Plan
-Progress of robot periodically
-Robot Modifications with pictures and diagrams
-Robot code with description
-Pre-Tournament Analysis
@Aiden Pyle
Thats awesome to hear! Yea my team has a few things that sets us apart:
Gantt Charts
Excellent Drawings
Flow Charts, of lots of things
Our Daily Logs are pretty good
We tried to get all of the rubric sections checked, and thats how we made our journal.
Well, hopefully you guys can win the Design Award at the next tournament.
Same 
I’ve posted this before, but this video on design notebooks is really good. I approve of using the judges’ guide as a starting point.
Notebooks are extremely important to design awards. My suggestions for what to include would be your teams specific goals and strategy for how to win the game, a check-list before each tournament and/or game, short biographies of each team member that explains everything they do in addition to VEX, and of course, the design progress.
One thing I’d suggest is following the VRC Design Award Rubric found here:
Design Award Rubric