The engineering notebook is your team's record of its design journey — the problems they hit, the ideas they tried, what worked and what didn't. It's also the single biggest input to judged awards.
The notebook rubrics and award criteria are defined by VEX and Global Robotics; what follows is how they play out at local events.
What judges actually do with it
Global Robotics defines the process: notebooks are first sorted for completeness — only fully developed notebooks stay in the running for the major judged awards — and then at least two judges evaluate each one against the official Engineering Notebook Rubric, which scores the engineering design process, documentation, and project management, with final rankings settled by judges' discussion rather than scores alone. Locally, our Judge Advisors organize the judging day by sorting notebooks into three working levels — Emerging, Proficient, and Expert.
What wins is the same either way: judges are directed to value the design journey, student ownership, and evidence of learning — not appearance or length. A genuine, kid-written notebook that shows both the successes and the failures beats a tidy adult-polished one every time. (Global Robotics' Engineering Notebooks section is the authoritative home for all of this.)
Coaching it without doing it
- Make notebook time part of practice — ten minutes at the end, while it's fresh.
- Let the students write it. Photos, sketches, crossed-out ideas are all good signs.
- Date the entries and keep them in order — the notebook tells a story over the season.
Notebook deadlines at local events
Events using remote-notebooks judging collect notebooks digitally by a deadline before event day, so judges can score them in advance — miss it, and your team's notebook simply isn't in the judged pool. The deadline is set by your event's organizer (see Registering for tournaments); treat it like a match you can't be late to. In-person-judging events review notebooks on the day, usually collected at check-in.
The interview is the other half
Judges pair the notebook with a team interview — students explaining their own work. Practice it once before your first event: each kid says what they built and why, two minutes, no script.