Do you use a hardcover notebook? How many pages does it have and is it bound? Is it college ruled, wide ruled, or graph ruled? Does the notebook lay flat on the table when it is opened up? Etc.
My team with the best notebook (having won several Excellence and Design Awards over the years) uses a graph ruled bound notebook with holes prepunched for the bulk of their notebook. It is placed in a 3 ring binder with additional printed pages as appendices to the main notebook. The appendices contain print-outs of their code, pictures of the robot and other item that it makes sense to have printed rather than handwritten. This has been ruled acceptable for the 3 point bonus (I believe. Too lazy to look up the pertinent thread).
Our team uses a bound, hardcover notebook with 230 pages. It is 1/4 inch graph ruled and does lay flat when opened. We bought one from BookFactory and have been loving it so far. When we run out of space in our first one we will likely get a second from the same place. Similar to @536Mentor ,we also have a small 3 ring binder with additional resources (such as the game manual etc).
One thing we have found especially helpful is having a table of contents that corresponds with the exact number of pages in the book- unlike the vex official notebook that has less table of content entries than pages.
I am using Quadrille-Ruled notebook. It’s great for school reports and note taking. It has 4" x 4" square quad rulings. 3-hole punched to fit most standard binders.
Do you place the hard cover notebook into the binder as well or are they separate?
We usually keep them separate (rubber banding the bound notebook on top of the binder) because the bound notebook does not have hole punches
We really like this one, Vela Advanced ProCover Lab Notebook. It is not 3-ring punched, so we rubber-band it to a mini-binder of other stuff (like code).