Engineering Notebook Tips
by 5937 Renaissance Robotics
One of Renaissance Robotics strong areas in FTC is our Engineering Notebook with consistently high scores and Think Award trophies to go with it. We are often asked to help other teams with theirs and do presentations on the Engineering Notebook. Here are some of our favorite tips.
Renaissance Robotics does ours at home after each practice or event. We have an automatic calendar reminder that is sent to all of our emails. We all respond to it with our personal tasks and reflections for that day. Once everyone's entry is received, one of us will compile it into a single page for that day.
- READ THE RULES. Seriously, read them. There is a fair percentage of teams who ask for help, but have never read the rules. MOST of the issues we see are formatting issues, not content issues. Following the rules fixes this. To follow the rules, you need to read the rules, so you know what they are.
- COMPARE YOUR NOTEBOOK TO THE RULES. Print the rules out, highlight everything you have done correctly. Notice what is not highlighted. Now fix it. Honestly, it is that easy.
- MAKE IT A HABIT. There is no right, nor wrong way to do this. The main thing is to make sure the Engineering Notebook entries get done when they happen. Find the system that works for your team.
Renaissance Robotics does ours at home after each practice or event. We have an automatic calendar reminder that is sent to all of our emails. We all respond to it with our personal tasks and reflections for that day. Once everyone's entry is received, one of us will compile it into a single page for that day.
Workshop at Tesla's Laboratory 2014
Renaissance Robotics had the unique honor of winning the Think Award at every event the participated in last year in the state of Florida. Due to this, we were asked to share our tips with teams at the Tesla's Laboratory event. This event had one-on-one mentoring sessions for teams in several categories, including the Engineering Notebook.
Our coach of Renaissance Robotics, Denny, was asked to be the mentor to several teams seeking help with their Engineering Notebook for this event. We would have presented these tips ourselves, except we were installing Creo for teams for the Tesla's University PTC Creo training workshop we were hosting the following weekend.
Teams that received one-on-one mentoring at Tesla's Laboratory:
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