It was mentioned in this thread that the RECF judges guide won’t be coming out until later this year. Many teams, including mine, begin building/documenting right now. My question is, how are we to know if it is legal to use an electronic notebook to begin documenting if it won be confirmed or deni…

I’m not a judge, but I have lived in lab books for more than 30 years at this point. As I understand it, the bonus for a bound book is to encourage preservation and presentation of contemporaneous notes: do a thing and write it down in a place where it can’t be re-ordered or edited. That provides pr…

I hope not. Digital notebooks were an absolute dumpster fire for my team during change up. One of the many reasons we just took a break and waited for the new game

To my understanding lab books fell out of favor fairly recently. I can say that when I spent 3 days shadowing a robotics startup there were no notebooks to be seen. Now that digital systems are capable of tracking/logging all changes I think paper notebooks are finally obsolete.

I can believe it. Maybe the students would commit their latest pages to github or similar? Those startup folk might be on here somewhere…

So the problem there isn’t an inexpensive/free system that does that tracking so our roboteers could do electronically managed books. Git is awesome for flat files, but isn’t what you want to string a notebook together. I’ve been messing with PMWiki. Teams can create pages, insert artifacts like …

I guess PMWiki or similar (MediaWiki of wikipedia fame?) also looks like a handy way to develop instutional knowledge, and stable references for enriching community interaction. I know nothing. Ah, except that someone has started an unofficial thing https://vexwiki.org/ and it’s not immediately obvi…

The Vex Wiki is actually pretty old and mostly abandoned I think. Here’s the recent activity: [image]

IMO, digital notebooks worked well for my team this year because we had more motivation to type out things that write them. If we drew something or took handwritten notes, we would just insert and image of them. We used a google doc/ drive to manage the notebook and other files.

I never liked the idea of referring to these team notebooks as true “engineering notebooks”. A true engineering notebook should read more like a journal from an individual following a design process, and not a portfolio of a team’s perfectly formatted documentation. The design process can look mes…

OK, so my impression would come back to a central theme of vex; to nurture young engineers. I’ll rattle off some thoughts and read others with interest. Getting teamwork and clear communication going while you’re developing discipline and range involves a lot of judgement calls about what to impose…

Will digital notebooks be allowed this year?

VEX V5 Robotics Competition V5 Tipping Point (21/22)

jpearman May 26, 2021, 7:46pm 12

There have been several wiki attempts over the years, that one dates from 2017, see original post.