FTC engineering notebook outline
Judges read a lot of notebooks in a short time. They are looking for evidence of a design process — decisions, and the reasoning behind them — not a photo album. This outline is the structure that makes that evidence easy to find.
Sections, in order:
- Team profile — who you are, where you are, how the team is organised
- Season summary — goals set at kickoff and how they changed
- Game analysis — how you read the game and what strategy followed from it
- Robot design, one section per subsystem — concept, iterations, final, with reasoning
- Software — approach, autonomous strategy, what you tried and abandoned
- Testing and results — what you measured, what it told you
- Business and sustainability — budget, sponsors, and the plan past this season
- Outreach — what you did, who it reached, what came of it
- Reflection — what you would do differently
Entry template
Date: [date] Subsystem: [drivetrain / intake / outtake / autonomous / …] Stage: [concept / prototype / iteration / final] Present: [names] Problem [What were we trying to solve, and why did it matter this season?] Options considered 1. [option] — [why it might work, why it might not] 2. [option] — [why it might work, why it might not] Decision [What we chose and the reason. Name the trade-off you accepted.] Result [What happened when we built and tested it. Numbers if you have them.] Next [What this leads to, and who is doing it.]
What makes an entry good:
- It is dated, and the dates run through the season rather than clustering in the last fortnight.
- It names a decision and the alternative that lost. A notebook with no rejected options shows no process.
- It contains a measurement — cycle time, weight, success rate over ten attempts.
- It shows a failure. Teams that only document successes read as teams that did not test.
- A photo or sketch is captioned with what it demonstrates, not just what it is.
The mistakes that cost awards:
- Written from memory in the final two weeks — judges recognise it immediately
- Photos with no explanation of what changed between them
- No numbers anywhere
- Outreach counted in events attended rather than what actually resulted
- No mention of anything that went wrong