Creating Your Engineering Notebook
Resources >> Creating Your Engineering Notebook
The Engineering Notebook is an extremely important part of the engineering design process, and helps to keep a tidy record of everything throughout an engineer's journey. VEX engineering notebooks are scored by judges during events, and can help a team rank better during competitions. In fact, an extraordinary notebook can even get a team to states, regardless of their performance during actual competition!
Additionally, notebooks help to keep records of what has worked and what hasn't, which can assist you later down the line. Notebooks can also be useful for team members working at different times, as one team member would be able to read the notebook and understand any changes made by the previous team member, along with record the changes they make for the next team member.
The Engineering Design Process
The engineering design process is a set of steps commonly used by engineers to try and find solutions to issues they have. Just like any other engineering challenge, the engineering design process can be applied to VEX for a better and more effective work pattern. Learning about the engineering design process will also be very important when trying to create great VEX engineering notebooks.
Below, we have compiled some resources useful in learning about the engineering design process.
Links:
Videos:
(Feel free to watch any/all of them)
VEX Engineering Notebook
Below is a list of useful learning resources we have compiled for the VEX Engineering Notebook:
A great example of an award winning VEX Engineering Notebook:
https://www.vexforum.com/t/2915a-engineering-notebook-2016/34746
Official VEX Design Award Rubric (includes engineering notebook, we highly carefully recommend reading this):
https://www.robotevents.com/season/130/document/71/download
Other Links:
https://renegaderobotics.org/engineering-notebook-design-award/#why
Page 14-16 of the REC VRC Team Guide: https://www.roboticseducation.org/documents/2020/07/recf-team-guide.pdf/
Videos:
Creating Your Notebook
We strongly suggest investigating more about the engineering notebook on your own and with your team. When you and your team are ready to create your engineering notebook (which you should do as soon as you can!) - which, for obvious reasons right now, will have to be a digital engineering notebook -, you can feel free to use our club template at the link below. We have created it for your convenience, but VEX does not mandate any specific template for engineering notebooks, so you can feel free to make your own template if you'd like!
Engineering Notebook Template (make a copy to use):
docs.google.com/document/d/1ch7azNzj6_f8LSjwpS1JguE6C2O9ObuwasUYXgL-9Ug/edit?usp=sharing
Note: Please feel free to add/change aspects of our template as you see fit. Our template has been left relatively blank on purpose, to provide you and your team with the most freedom in deciding what you want to put in your notebook. However, this also means that you will definitely want to add more sections/categories than we have provided. So, if you haven't yet taken a look at any of the notebook resources we provided above, please do so!!!