Understanding the Engineering Notebook Rubric
Below is the Engineering Notebook Rubric that is used for judging. While the structure and point system is openly available, the way each judge derives their score is not made public to teams. As each judge is an individual and each competition region is not run in the same manner, judging varies from event to event.
While a team may feel that the duty of maintaining a notebook is to assist in garnering an award at an event, and thus they should be striving to get as many points as possible in each category, the ultimate goal should be documenting a team's engineering design process. Some teams may not like to hear this, but it is part of an overall learning activity that exposes a team to research, brainstorming, project management, and written communication skills. All of these are real world life skills that can be leveraged as students progress through higher education and into the working world. With this stated, we will try to break down each criteria area and provide insight as to items that may be worth exploring and including in the notebook.
Notebook judging has a core focus around the Engineering Design Process (EDP) with 6 (six) criteria areas that are directly defined in the rubric as being within the EDP along with 4 additional areas that are evaluated that contain aspects of the EDP.
While these topics can be assessed independently since they each have their own evaluation guidelines, they are also looked at as a whole. For instance, the items on the left below typically can be evaluated singularly and on their own and may not rely on another category to get full marks, while some items on the right may rely on content that is derived from the topics on the left.
Engineering Notebook Rubric Criteria Categories
Engineering Design Process Categories | Additional Criteria Categories |
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