(upbeat music)

Welcome, in this video we're going to be talking about what an Engineering Notebook is, what you should record in your engineering notebook, and why you should be using an engineering notebook throughout this STEM lab. Let's go ahead and answer the first question.

An engineering notebook is a place to keep notes, document your design process, and your design ideas as you go through the STEM lab. In the STEM lab, you should be recording all sorts of iteration. It's one of the most important things for you to record. As you go through, you may be recording changes to the build, changes in VEXcode to your VEXcode IQ project. Anything that you want to change, you want to record those ideas in your notebook, test them, and then record what happened. It's part of the whole process.

Now we provide in the practice section images of examples of ways that you could set up your engineering notebook. But your engineering notebook is personal. It's all about how you want to set it up. This may be by putting in pictures, by sketching things, you can print out pictures, paste them in, whatever you need to do to make it your own. With engineering notebooks, they do not have to be gorgeously organized. As long as they're usable, that's the most important thing is to be able to go back and reference that data later.

You can also use an engineering notebook to record game strategy ideas or rules about the game. As you're introduced to different elements of the game that you're going to be playing in this unit, you can write down ideas of what you would do to have the highest score or the best robot, so you could win the game at the end of this unit. By using an engineering notebook, you can go back through and make informed decisions as you make changes.

So why use an engineering notebook? Part of this is so you can make data-based decisions. As you make changes, as you iterate on your robot, as you iterate on your code, as you iterate on your game strategy, that's all part of it together. Part of the other things that you can do is that engineering notebooks are used by engineers in their daily jobs. They record their design process, their ideas, their thoughts, what worked well, what did not work, so that others can go through and verify that process or recreate the entire process from beginning to end of what happened as that engineer designed it.

What you are doing is part of a process that could connect to a future career for you as well. As you go through, there are some prompts in the lessons, as I mentioned in the practice section, of what you can record and what that can look like, but feel empowered to go through and make changes and to make additional notes as desired. Your engineering notebook is all about what you feel is best to record so that you can have the best robot possible at the game at the end.

Have fun and I cannot wait to see what your designs are.

(upbeat music)