Hey! I’m Diana, a passionate notebooker in VEX for the last 6 years. I want to spur positive change in the VEX community and RECF to improve the notebooking experience. Please help me out by filling out this form. (It’s quick, dw.)
I’ll share the results with you all when the responses die down. Thanks! 
In my opinion, one of the biggest issues concerning notebooking is that in many localities there is just one or couple teams that keep winning design awards at the every competition. This makes other teams question utility of investing efforts in doing quality notebooks and, to some degree, demotivates them.
One of the possible solutions would be to either add more local competition awards that count notebooking points (similar to award sets the states ore regional level) or allow only one Design Award per team per season for each competition level. For example, you are eligible only to one Design Award at the local level, one at the state level, one at the signature and one at the worlds division level.
I had similar experiences competing in my area since, unlike most regions, teams within my community/associated organizations typically only participate in a single (official) tournament a season so this makes that single tournament extremely high-stakes since it literally determines the success of a team for the entire season.
However, I think that this will generally be improved once teams in my region start hosting their own tournaments. More international schools in my area are opening up teams so hopefully more tournaments could be hosted and more opportunities to win awards will be given to all teams.
I am more of a builder/driver/programmer person. I personally kinda hate notebooking, as it is a bit boring. However, we want excellence so we kind of have to do it. Also, no one on our team wants to notebook so I kinda gotta do everything.
In my opinion, notebooking is one of the more tedious parts of the vex iq process. But our team strives for perfection, so we do it anyway
I personally dont rhink its useful, but thats because im our teams programmer and i dont work that way. Its just me though.
Most of the time people complain about notebooking but as long as you built it you have to have some thought process around how you did that, that being said it doesn’t mean that you have to be the one typing it in or perfecting it. Assign team roles, easiest being taking photos of everyday builds and you then later type about what you did. Digital notebooks are the best for this.
I believe notebook is extremely important and useful.
However, with respect to excellence, I believe the requirements should be similar to skills and qualifications, where to qualify for excellence you must just be in the top 30% of developed notebooks based on the rubric. Additional determinations should be made based on the excellence of the program as determined by the interview and actual content of the notebook (not just the number scored on the rubric). Far too often I have seen excellence given to the best notebook and design given to the second best. Producing documentation that shows the quality of your program both lessens the emphasis of scoring high on the rubric and emphasizes the importance of documenting everything that your team does, which is the intent or spirit of having the notebook in the first place.
I know far too many teams who write a notebook exclusively for getting points on the rubric and not for documenting the process. And I personally know people who will wait until the week before a competition without having any notes and will CAD a robot and fabricate a story for a notebook that is not true at all, but gets points on the notebook and it’s just sad.
As a student competing at the university level, we use our documentation to get grants from the school. We are able to use nearly identical skills for writing research papers. The notebook is very important and is very useful when justifying our team’s existence to the University.
An engineering notebook is not an end in itself.
At high levels, the motivation for using an engineering notebook is not to win awards. Engineers document their work because this greatly increases productivity. Without proper documentation of work, it would be impossible to work in large teams. Without documenting our engineering work, mankind would have never set foot on the moon.
Yeah, sorry… that was a bit dramatic.
I agree; this is a problem.
Yeah, this is disappointing. I have talked to someone who helped judge notebooks at worlds, and listening to how they judge notebooks the process seems to filter out notebooks like these. It can be pretty easy to tell if a notebook was made this way; everything is too perfect, very few failures are documented etc…
Personally, I am very grateful that engineering notebooks are a part of the VEX robotics competition. The skills we learn by documenting our work are exactly the skills needed in the workforce. My father is an engineer at Northrop Grumman, and I’ve asked him about the similarities between what we do, and what they do. He was able to tell me that it is in fact very similar.
One of the differences he pointed out is that they will only use quantifiable data. I sometimes find myself using qualitative data; saying things like “…was bent… much better grouping… the tri-balls scattered a lot… easier to push in from the front than the side… faster… slower… etc.” By using quantifiable data, you can easily compare results from different prototypes, instead of simply saying it “looks” better. Whenever we do use quantifiable data in testing, or making decisions, we are always much more confident in our decisions, and/or they are higher quality.
Notebooks are great!
Can we all just be honest and say that nobody likes note-keeping but it is a necessary evil.
Yes, we can.
Nobody likes thoughtless posts. There are many benefits to notebooking, and if I didn’t enjoy notebooking, I wouldn’t do it. 
The notebook to some people isn’t fun and exciting like building or driving. Nobody cheers when the notebook shines until it helps you win an award but even then it’s not up there accepting the trophy. There are some people that do love the notebook and put as much time and effort into it as building the bot. These people are going to be the bosses of the notebook haters one day.
Here’s my take as someone who’s been an engineer for almost 40 years (and a mentor/coach for 10)… building robots and competition is great fun, and we mentors/coaches celebrate the success of our kids…but in the background, we really do this because we see the life-skills our kids are learning which sets them up for future success in their careers.
You can be the greatest engineer in the world, but if you can’t document what you do, your work is futile. I realized this in my first job after college, a welding engineer for the Navy in ’91, we’d do 3 months of research and testing for a supplier to be approved for a Navy contract, (they paid $25k for our work) and it all wrapped up into a 6-page report which would make-or-break multi-million dollar contracts to sell steel or welding filler materials to the Navy. I didn’t have robotics when I was a kid, but for you guys, the skills you’re learning in robotics (problem-solving, teamwork, professional networking, CAD, and of course documentation) set you up for awesome careers and advancement opportunities in life.
So yes, notebooking is important.
Notebooking is something I absolutely despised when I started doing it (granted, I was given a few weeks to make an entire year’s notebook for states), but now I actually kind of love it…though I’ll never admit that to my team. Since I’m pretty bad at building, notebooking gives me the chance to understand what’s going on, and I’ve learned so much about building by forcing my teammates to explain everything to me. Plus, it’s always a fun way to prevent my lovely team captain from rebuilding shortly before comp…“if you rebuild the robot, I’m quitting notebook and we are never ever ever gonna make worlds.”
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