Mahogany Squad and Ark of the RiverFTC Team #17628 and #24387
An engineering notebook is one of the most heavily-weighted judged elements in FTC. It tells the story of your season — from brainstorming to iteration to competition. This guide walks you through exactly how to structure and write a notebook that impresses judges.
The Inspire Award is almost entirely driven by your engineering portfolio. Even awards like Think, and Connect reference the quality of the portfolio.
Judges read dozens of portfolios per event. A clear, well-organized portfolio stands out immediately. Your goal is to make the judge's job easy: they should be able to open any page and instantly understand what your team was thinking. Your portfolio should be clear, concise and able to convey what your team did.
Use a consistent layout with every entry. A strong entry includes all of the details of that entry's specific theme. For example, if you are doing a portfolio entry on your robot design you would want to include what your inspiration was, when you thought of the prototype, and who helped design all of the versions of the design.
Start your portfolio with a Team Introduction page, team number, members, roles, and a mission statement (if you have one). Follow this with a Season Overview that outlines your game analysis and high-level goals before diving into entries.
Organize entries in a way that makes sense. Put entries like outreach and recruitment next to each other if possible. For the engineering design process judges don’t just want to see your final product, they want to see how you got there, what you did and the steps you took to achieve where you are now.
Every slide needs to answer three questions. What did we plan? What did we accomplish? What did we learn?
Use headings, bullet points and custom layouts to make the portfolio visually pleasing and efficient.
Be honest about failures. Instead of “It didn’t work” say how it didn’t work and how you plan to fix it.
Document why you chose the design you did. This shows judges you thought critically rather than just copying an existing robot design.
Run an “Outreach Log” through the season. This looks very impressive to the judges.
Create multiple other documents that will aid you during the season. Some good examples would be sponsorship brochures and scouting sheets.