[team F.T.C 4240]

Blake,

In the manual it says "The Engineering Notebook is also a good place to discuss and show team activities that are done throughout the team’s season. These activities can be placed in a separate section of the Engineering Notebook or chronologically within the design pages."

To me that means if say we went to an Engineering facility for tour to get ideas of what we could use in the robots design, or the vast amount of community service the team does, it shouldn't just be thrown away or confuse people by have three or four notebooks.

The manual says "Document EVERYTHING!!", not throw out everything but prototypes, CAD, building process and programming, ect. Connect Award (first sentence): "This award is given to the team that most connected with their local community and the engineering community", if you leave out what I said earlier then how will the judges know you did anything at all for the community or reached out to engineering company's, there is more then enough space in the engineering notebook for a small section about community service, ect. It is also a lot easier to keep track of one notebook apposed to two or three.

The team's notebook isn't perfect and it doesn't need to be, in my mind it just needs to get the information over to the judges of how we went through our whole year (so far) as a team, the team spends a lot of time on the engineering notebook documenting everything, not only to be eligible for awards but it is also very good for past references and is a nice reminder of the past year.

We document everything, but that is just my team. If your team wants to only document specific things its up to you, every team is different and like a team there is no robot/notebook alike, which is the great thing about FTC is there is so much creativity. Write the engineering notebook the way it seems fit for your team or however you want, but the best thing to do is read the game manual (section 5 for the engineering notebook).

~Derrick