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Hi, I'm Kam. I'm a Team Engagement Manager with the REC Foundation. Welcome to the Mentor PD tutorial. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about the Engineering Design Notebook.

Now, first let's talk about what engineering design is. Engineering is an iterative process. That means it is trial and error, and it means that it goes through many cycles. So you have to go back and forth. It is a creative process and it's not always linear. First, you want a student to define a problem. On a robot, you might have multiple problems or multiple goals that you're trying to reach. For something like this, it might be that you have to be able to lift something, go forward, or push something. These are multiple things that the students will have to go through the design process to figure out.

After they've defined a problem, they'll want to do some research and brainstorm possible solutions. Maybe things are already done, and they just need to pull together ideas from other places. Once your team has done some research and brainstorming, they'll want to sit down and actually design it. That's where iteration comes in because you don't just design once. Your students will start building, testing, and evaluating. When they're testing, that's when those redesign ideas are gonna start happening. Your students should be taking data down on what the test results are and using that as part of their redesign. You go through the cycle many times, and like I said, it's not always linear. You might get to building and realize, "Oh, we need to redesign something because we completely miscalculated how something goes."

So that's a little background on what the engineering design process is for your student. We incorporate the engineering design into a notebook system so that it mimics what engineers in the real world do. It is a component of our competition. You actually get to submit your notebook for judges to review. Notebooks are a great place for students who have a lot of different thoughts and ideas to document them. They could be a digital notebook, meaning the students can share a document online, or a physical notebook. Some of you might have these wonderful notebooks that came with your welcome kits. You're welcome to use those, or any bounded notebook will work just fine.

So how do we incorporate the notebook into the actual competition? Well, at some of the tournaments, you'll see that judging is offered. This means we have adult volunteer coaches who are judges at the competition. Judges will review your students' work and take a look at their notebook, reviewing all the hard work. It's so great for the kids to be able to say, "I had weeks and weeks of perseverance through all this trial and error we do." Somebody's gonna look at it and think, "Wow, these kids work really hard on this." This is a great thing.

In combination with the notebook, students will also receive a judging interview with our volunteer judges. During the judging interview, it is a great time for the students to practice their communication skills. We don't want students to feel like they have to have a well-rehearsed speech with poster boards or a slideshow. In fact, those are not legal in it; we want it to be more conversational. But I know that's a lot to ask of students to just be on the fly and come up with answers when they're talking to a new adult they haven't talked to before. So we do have some support to help you with that.

I want to give you a tool to help you prepare your students for the interview and their notebooks.

Go to our webpage at roboticseducation.org, where you'll be looking for the document called Engineering Notebook Rubric. This is the rubric that judges use to evaluate your students' work. You can see that it's broken down into expert, proficient, and emerging because we understand learning is a spectrum. It isn't something that students are just going to have a good notebook or a bad notebook. There is always something that they can be working on.

The second part of this document is the Team Interview Rubric. Again, it is a guide for all judges to have conversations with your students and look for the different characteristics and qualities of their collaboration. Judges love talking to all the students. So whenever possible, please try to have all of your team be part of that conversation.

We are not expecting students to have a very well-polished presentation with a poster board and a slideshow. We don't want that. We want more of a conversation between the judges and the students. They want to talk to all of them because they want to hear all the different perspectives within one team and the different ways that they collaborate. It is also a really great time for your team to bring your judge to the robot and say, "Here's our work. This is what we designed. I want to show you all the different parts. I want to show you where we had a lot of struggles, and I want to show you the solution that we came up with." Judges will be looking for the thinking behind their design process on that.

I hope that's a bit helpful to you to be able to prepare your students so that they have a successful and positive experience at a tournament. You can find this document also linked below here.

That's it for now, and I'll talk to you next time.

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