My team and I have just started our second season and we would like to have the best engineering notebook possible. In your opinion, is Word a good site or do you have better ones? Thanks
I would definitely not recommend word. I would recommend google docs. However, if this is your first notebook I would recommend using the RECF template as you do more research about the notebook and you can make your own next season.
More information about notebooks is below
https://v5rc-kb.recf.org/hc/en-us/categories/9625651590423-Notebooks
Platform usually doesn’t change the quality of the notebook too drastically.
You should really just use whatever you’re more comfortable with- Most teams opt for google docs, as it’s easier to format and such (as Word is usually more complex to some people)
If this is your complete first notebook, I recommend using the templates and reviewing some previous notebooks from other teams.
You have plenty of options… Google Docs will help you maintain a table of contents. But whatever your team is comfortable with.
Word Online would probably work too for your table of contents. But I’m not as familiar with it.
I would say that you want to be in the cloud, regardless of what you use.
THIS ^^^^^
The best platform for documentation is the TEAM.
The quality of the notebook reflects in an authentic manner the skill level of the team. All members should be participating the documentation process. Team members should be able to contribute to the team’s documentation in the way they are most expressive.
Today we had a discussion about speech to text tools - why not allow just voice annotations in the document? We accept pictures and scans of handdrawn images and text.
What is essential is for the team members to all contribute and understand the contribution of their teammates to the documentation of the team’s documentation of their season journey.
There is no one size fits all documentation platform as all teams are different.
We use Canva, and I think it has a lot of valuable features. As other people have mentioned, the platform you use doesn’t affect how good your notebook is, but it does affect how efficiently you can do your notebook and how you learn to notebook. Google Docs is pretty easy to use and accessible from anywhere, but it’s pretty simple, and it isn’t too easy to create elements and templates. If you really want to have the best notebook possible, I think most teams use Canva or Word, but there is a learning curve (I think most teams prefer Canva, but I have never used Word). I would suggest trying out different platforms to see what suits your team best, as there are also situational factors that affect the platform (like Canva being blocked by your school).
This is the notebook explanation for the worlds excellence winners last year.
I also suggest watching this video to understand the notebook rubric.
Again, the most important thing is making sure you are doing your notebook consistently and trying your best to follow the rubric.
If the technology is organizing and presenting your notebook more “efficiently”, then the technology is NOT reflecting your skill level. (do note, this not technology specific - but technology agnostic - imagine your friend rewriting everything because you did not have the skills to do so? or time (so-called “efficiency”) that would not reflect your skill accurately.
My recommendation, express yourself in your own words your design decisions that represent the robot your team designs, built, coded, and competed with. Otherwise, what your are representing at inspection, in your notebook, or in matches… may not represent the skill level of your team and may not pass inspection due to robot rules.
I mean more features, ex: I often use the square and line elements to create simple diagrams in Canva, which only requires a click on a button. But in docs I believe you have to insert a google drawing whenever you want an element. I used efficiently here to mean having the means to present your notebook with your own creative vision without it taking time from the actual substance/text of the notebook.
I’d actually like to elaborate more on this point! Cause it’s really good.
At the end of each of our sessions for working on our robot (this is usually 10 minutes out of the 83 minutes in the whole day) I get my team to write their daily log, and in my notebook we quote
“Each day our team members will be summarizing what they did for the team! Through this you will get to see our personalities, you’ll get to see glimpses of who we are and how we are collaborating to build the robot.”
Which- yeah I guess it kinda now looks corny as I put it on a forum and it’s talking about our personalities and stuff.
But back to mainstream, I would make them and I spend the last ten minutes to write a decent paragraph of what we did today. And where we write it depends, I got 2 kids in my team that prefer writing on the google doc, another kid that likes writing in a private google slide (I don’t really know why, they say it’s for tracking the past dates but- I guess sure) and me and another one likes writing it on paper and when we get some down time we type it into the notebook.
And we always check that the other wrote something- And actually, I haven’t had to deal with anybody using AI! 
Cause, after dealing with a whole team you slowly start to learn how they write and all that.
So yes- Don’t let your friend write your part in the notebook cause you think you don’t know how to. And if you don’t know how to, you’ll learn.
Okay, my rant is over!
My team uses google slides, it really helps us access with the table of contents and slides. As the primary notebook it really helps.
Here are some resources that may help.
Purdue SIGBots Wiki Judging Guide - recently updated in the past few weeks. Breakdown of Notebook and Interview rubrics and tips
Purdue SIGBots Wiki Notion Guide - guide for using the Notion platform in notebooking. BLRS2 has used Notion in the past few seasons with pretty good levels of success.
As a general rule of thumb - use whatever platform would enable you to make the best notebook. If that’s something simple like Google Docs or Slides, then great. The content of the notebook is being scored, not whether you use the official VEX template or something more complex like Notion or Obsidian.
Hope this helps! Always happy to talk Judging
Along with that, using a digital thing like google slides is like easier to like insert CAD, sketches, and etc. Even if you use a physical notebook it doesn’t really matter, just show all of the steps of the design process like identify, brainstorm, select, plan. build, and test and be detailed. Don’t say we built the base and designed the base elaborate and show each step of the design process, Along with that it is really important to have code, drive strategies, and game analysis. Also show budgeting, maybe a GANTT Chart, and like a team management thing. Using google slides/powerpoints really help me type up really fast entries and it makes the notebook process rally neat and precise. By taking these tips into account can help allow awards(we won Excellence at States and Innovate at Worlds in our other team in Virginia).
I use Canva to make the templates, design icons, and create graphs; however, I use Google Slides for actually inputting information and images.
Make sure to have a SYSTEM.
My agreement with my team is that whenever someone is in our club room working on any aspect of the robot, they type it down in our team log, essentially a spreadsheet with notes for what we did (formatted in the engineering design process) for every day. This makes the notebooker’s job much easier. Team members also upload images to our Google Drive with folders for each day separated.
Heres a page from my notebook if you’re interested 
