Module 1 Mastery Quiz: The Engineering Notebook
I. Conceptual Questions
1. Two Audiences: The notebook serves both the team and the judges. Explain why these two audiences want the same document rather than two different ones.
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Both want a record of decisions and the reasoning behind them. The team needs it because people forget why a spool diameter or a gear ratio was chosen, and rediscovering that reasoning through testing is expensive. Judges need it because it is the only evidence that the robot was engineered rather than assembled. A notebook written for judges alone drifts toward narrative and polish, which makes it less useful to the team and, because judges recognize retroactive writing, less convincing to judges as well.
2. Recording Failures: A team is reluctant to write down a mechanism that failed, on the grounds that it makes the team look bad. Why is this reasoning backwards?
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A notebook containing only successes reads as fiction, because real engineering produces failures at a predictable rate. The failure entry is also the highest-information entry in the book: it contains a measurement, a diagnosis, and a change, which is the complete design loop in one page. Judges specifically look for documented failure and iteration, and the failure entry is the one they are most likely to ask about, because it is the hardest to fabricate after the fact.
3. Trial Counts: Explain why "the intake worked when we tested it" is a weaker statement than "the intake acquired the element on 23 of 25 attempts," beyond simply being less precise.
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Mechanisms fail intermittently, and an intermittent failure is invisible in a single trial. A single successful trial cannot distinguish between a mechanism that works 100% of the time and one that works 60% of the time. The 23 of 25 statement establishes a reliability figure that can be compared against a requirement, compared against the previous version to show whether a change helped, and used to predict how many failures to expect across a tournament. It also implies the failures were recorded individually, which is where the diagnostic pattern usually lives.
4. Matrix Ordering: Why must criteria be weighted before options are scored, and what specifically goes wrong when a team does it in the other order?
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If the options are scored first, the team can see which weights would produce which winner. Weight adjustment then stops being an expression of strategy and becomes a way to justify a conclusion already held, usually without anyone consciously deciding to do that. The resulting matrix documents a bias while appearing to document analysis, which is worse than no matrix at all: it gives false confidence and it misleads anyone who reads the notebook later, including the team itself.
5. Close Results: A decision matrix ranks concept A at 61 points and concept B at 59. A student says the matrix has failed to give a clear answer. What is the correct interpretation?
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The matrix succeeded. It reported that the two concepts are close enough that the difference is smaller than the noise in how people assign 1 to 5 scores. That is a genuine and useful finding: it means the decision cannot be made reliably on paper. The correct response is to build rough prototypes of both and let measured data break the tie. Declaring A the winner over a 2 point margin would be treating estimate noise as evidence.
II. Review the Entry
Below is a notebook entry from a team. Identify the 2 problems and rewrite the affected parts.
Date: 3 Nov Subsystem: Slide
Today we worked on the linear slide. We tried a few things and
made some good progress. The new version is a lot better than
the old one and extends much faster now. It seemed pretty
reliable when we ran it. We will keep working on it next time.
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Problem 1 - No stated problem and no reproducible description of the change. "We tried a few things" cannot be reproduced, compared, or learned from. A reader cannot tell what was changed, so they cannot tell what caused the improvement, and if the slide regresses later nobody can revert to a known state.
PROBLEM
Slide took 3.1 s to reach full extension; the cycle time
requirement allows 2.0 s.
WHAT WE TRIED
Replaced the 1.0 in spool with a 1.4 in spool, keeping the
same 312 RPM motor and 3 stage cascade rigging.
Problem 2 - Results are adjectives, with no numbers and no trial count. "A lot better," "much faster," and "pretty reliable" are opinions. They cannot be compared to the requirement, cannot be compared to the previous version, and give no basis for deciding whether the mechanism is competition ready.
RESULT
Extension time 2.2 s, averaged over 10 runs (range 2.1 to 2.4 s).
Full extension reached 10/10. Two runs showed the third stage
binding briefly near the top of travel.
NEXT
Still 0.2 s over the requirement. Check whether the bind at the
top of travel is costing time; inspect third stage alignment
before changing the spool again.
On the closing line: "We will keep working on it next time" is not a Next step. A Next step names the specific question the following session will answer.
III. Scored Check
The questions above are for working something through. These are graded, so you can find out whether it stuck. Everything is scored in your browser.
// module-01/mastery-quiz.check
Scored Check
5 questions. 80% to pass. Answers are graded in your browser and nothing is submitted anywhere.
1. Which notebook entry is most useful to a judge and to your team?
2. How many trials are needed before calling a mechanism competition ready?
3. In a weighted decision matrix, when must the criteria be weighted?
4. Concept A scores 61 and concept B scores 59 in your matrix. What should you do?
5. A trial fails because someone bumped the robot. What should the notebook say?
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