Part #9: Notebook Know-Hows | SUMMER ROBOTICS: Tips and Tricks for Your Team

This week we are continuing with tips for the sub-teams of our team. We covered hardware and software, but you also need to get the engineering notebook ready before competition. The notebook is a big task, and it definitely becomes a group project very fast. Your notebook is a constant work in progress, so here are the best tips from our rookie season to build your best notebook as you go through the season.

---

Tip #1: Write down EVERYTHING

No piece of information is insignificant to the judges at competition, and chances are, if you write down everything, you can better pinpoint the problem when it comes up. Write down stuff as it happens too. You remember the most detail right after it happens and if you wait a few weeks or even a few days before you write it down, a lot can get lost from your memory. Extra details can also be important for when something goes wrong, especially during competition. If you have a detailed account of when you built or programmed that part of the robot, you can more easily find the problem with your design or build and fix it quickly.

Tip #2: Get everyone's voice

The engineering notebook is not someone's first-person novel about what your team did this season. It requires accounts from everyone and their thoughts and activities throughout the season. The best way to get everyone's voice and still stay organized is to have one person (a "notebook person" per say) organize a form or other way for each of your team members to write down what they did leading up to and during one of your team meetings. They can also note their intent to prepare for the next meeting. The "notebook person" can then be responsible for putting everyone's information into your engineering notebook. This system works best when you're using an electronic notebook, but if you are using a handwritten notebook, you can use a similar method, but just have everyone fill out a section of your meeting records. Our team uses an electronic notebook. This is what we include when we document meetings, and you might want to include some of the same things when you ask your teammates for information to put in the notebook.

Tip #3: Make it a collaborative document

Electronic engineering notebooks are a bit harder to keep track of who has been editing them, and it takes a little more initiative on the part of your team members to make the effort to change your notebook and keep it up to date. The best way to make sure everyone can change and view the notebook is to make it a collaborative document. you can do this through a Google Docs or Microsoft Word with One Drive. Our team uses Google Drive out of personal preference, but both have their pros and cons, and you should really test out both to see which works best for your team. Another important benefit of making the notebook visible to everyone all the time is that it can help communicate what happened during a meeting in case one of your team members is absent (This only works if you keep your notebook updated at least daily!).

Tip #4: Use your team summary page to your full advantage

I feel like every team says this when they give you tips on the notebook, but it's totally true! The first thing the judges turn to is your team summary page. They obviously don't have time to read your whole notebook, so the things you highlight in the summary page are the things they're going to look at. Make it a point to reference the pages in your notebook that make you most proud or express your team's values and mission the best.

Tip #5: Go through it about once a month with the entire team

Some of the contents of your notebook should be updated at least once a month. Things like your goals and your game strategy should be updated as you make progress on your robot. You should document the steps your team has made towards completing your team goals to show your progress, and update your plan for completing your goal as needed to keep your team on track (a lot of things that you didn't expect when making your goals will pop up and you'll need to change your plan). Also keep your game strategy updated. I highly doubt you strategy after you've built your robot will be the same as when you first made a strategy. Keep it updated as soon as you change your strategy. We recommend you sit down as a team and read through your notebook at least once a month and a week or so before your competition. Together you can catch the inconsistencies and update information that may have changed.

---

Be on the lookout for our next blog post with more tips and tricks next week about going to competition and what to expect. We hope you enjoy this SUMMER ROBOTICS series and put some of these tips to good use with your FTC team.