Lesson 1.1: What the Engineering Notebook Is Actually For
Technical Context
Most teams treat the notebook as a chore assigned to whoever is least interested in building. That produces a document written in the last two weeks of the season, describing a robot the writer did not design, in language that reveals nobody was taking notes at the time.
Judges recognize this immediately, because the notebook they want to see cannot be written retroactively.
Two Audiences, Both Real
Your team, three weeks from now. Why is the intake spool 1.4 inches instead of 2? Someone knew in October. By January that person has forgotten, and if the spool ever needs replacing, the team either rediscovers the reasoning through testing or guesses. A notebook that captures decisions is a defense against your own forgetting.
Judges. In FTC, notebook-driven awards are among the most prestigious available, and they are decided largely on documented process. Judges are looking for evidence that the team engineered the robot rather than assembled it.
The two audiences want the same thing, which is convenient: a record of decisions and the reasoning behind them.
What Judges Look For
Judges are not grading handwriting. They are looking for a small number of specific things.
| They look for | What it looks like on the page |
|---|---|
| Iteration | Multiple versions of the same mechanism, with what changed and why |
| Evidence | Numbers from tests, not adjectives |
| Reasoning | Alternatives considered and the criteria used to choose |
| Ownership | Student voice, student sketches, student handwriting |
| Honesty | Failures recorded, including the ones that were not fixed |
That last row surprises teams. A notebook full of successes reads as fiction. A notebook that says "the slide bound at full extension three times out of ten, we traced it to the third stage flexing, and here is what we changed" reads as engineering.
The entry describing something that did not work, what you measured, and what you concluded is worth more than three entries describing something that worked. It is also the entry a judge is most likely to ask about, because it is the one that proves the process is real.
What Belongs In It
- Design decisions and the reasoning, including rejected alternatives
- Sketches, with dimensions and annotations
- Test data: dates, conditions, trial counts, results
- Calculations, including the ones that showed a design would not work
- Meeting notes that record what was decided, not just what was discussed
- Photographs of prototypes, with captions explaining what is being shown
- Failures, root causes, and fixes
What Does Not Belong In It
- A narrative written after the fact to look organized
- Pages of pasted vendor catalog text
- Attendance logs and unrelated administration, unless your team's format requires them
- Screenshots with no caption explaining why they are there
Judges cannot tell what a photograph is meant to show. Every image needs one sentence: what it is, when it was taken, and what it demonstrates. "Intake v2 mounted on the test chassis, 11 Oct, showing the funnel angle we increased from 20 to 35 degrees" is a caption. "Intake" is not.
Paper or Digital
Both are used successfully. The format matters far less than the habit.
Paper is faster for sketching and harder to fake after the fact, since entries are dated in sequence. It is also easy to lose and hard to search.
Digital is searchable, shareable, and can hold photographs and CAD screenshots naturally. It is also easy to backfill, which is exactly the temptation to avoid.
If you go digital, timestamp entries as you write them and resist editing old pages. The value of the notebook comes from it being a record, and a record you rewrite is a story.
- Award descriptions and judging criteria are published each season: FIRST Tech Challenge Game and Season Info
Fill-in-the-Blank Practice
- A notebook entry describing a test should contain numbers rather than
__________. - Judges consider a notebook that records only successes to be less credible because it lacks documented
__________. - Every photograph in the notebook needs a
__________explaining what it shows and why it is there.
Show answers
- adjectives (subjective descriptions such as "fast" or "reliable")
- failures (or iteration, problems encountered)
- caption
Exercise
Open your team's current notebook. Find the most recent entry and ask: could a new team member, reading only this page, tell what problem was being solved and what was decided? If not, rewrite it. That rewrite is your first entry in the format the rest of this module teaches.
Ready to move on?
Sign in with Google to save your progress with Telemark, or continue without saving.
Stuck on this lesson?
Ask about anything on this page. It can see which lesson you have open and which part you are reading.