Design Award

The Design Award is based off team engineering notebooks and interview with the judges.  The interview will take place at a time separate from STEM Project judging. A top scoring design notebook will include:

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• Identify the challenge(s) - Describes the challenge at the start of each design process iteration with words and pictures, and states the team's’ goals for accomplishing that challenge

• Brainstorm Solutions - Lists 3 or more possible approaches to the challenge with labeled diagrams

• Select the best approach and plan - Explains why the selected approach was chosen and why the other alternatives were not chosen. Fully describes the plan

• Build, Program and Test - Records the building, programming and test processes and the test results in such detail that someone outside the team could recreate the robot by following the steps in the notebook

• Repeat process steps, if needed - Contains a complete history of the design process iterations for the season that resulted in the current robot design, repeating the steps above for each iteration

• Complete and organized document of Robot Design Process - Contains Project and Team Assignments, Entries from team meetings, with goals, decisions and accomplishments, and recorders’ names or initials and dates. Indexed so that anyone can easily locate any needed information

• Team demonstrates effective management of skills, time, and material resources - Includes an overall project timeline against which progress is checked regularly as well as daily goals and accomplishments. Documents the assignments of each team member based on skills and availability.

3 bonus points for a bound notebook