How your team fills out the engineering notebook brainstorm slides (drivetrain concepts, intake concepts, scoring concepts, defensive concepts, comparison tables) without copying from reference sites.
This is a process, not a list of rules. Walk it in order. The output is a notebook section that earns rubric credit because it shows real divergent thinking from your team — not transcribed content from somewhere else.
Judges read engineering notebooks to evaluate how the team thought, not just what the team built. The brainstorm section (gold, EDP Step 2) is where this is most visible. A brainstorm that looks copied from a reference site is the worst-case judging outcome — it reads as both lazy and dishonest at the same time.
The fix isn't to avoid reference sites — you're supposed to research as part of EDP Step 2. The fix is to use them at the right time and in the right way. That's what this workflow is for.
Total time: ~50 minutes per subsystem. Run separately for drivetrain, intake, scoring, defensive (slides 19, 20, 21, 22).
Each student on the team sketches 3 wild concepts for the subsystem on scratch paper. No filtering, no judgment. Bad ideas welcome — at this stage, “bad” is data.
Why this works: If you research first, your concepts are bounded by what you saw. If you sketch first, you generate ideas the references didn't prompt. That's where original thinking comes from.
Now the team can open spartandesignrobotics.org, watch community videos, look at past-season VEX teams' notebooks. The assignment: find one concept that none of your Round 1 sketches captured, and add it as a fourth concept on paper.
Why this works: Reference sites are most useful for catching what you missed, not for generating concepts in the first place. Your Round 1 sketches anchor your team's thinking. Round 2 expands it.
From your now-4 concept pile, pick the 3 strongest. For each, write the pros and cons in your own words.
Why this works: Forcing pros/cons to be team-specific prevents copy-paste from reference sites. The website doesn't know your team. You do.
Slides 24–27 ask for an 8-criterion comparison table per subsystem. The cells must contain numbers your team calculated, not numbers from a reference page.
Why this works: Numbers force ownership. If the cell says “cycle time: 8.2 seconds,” somebody had to compute that. The website can teach you the formula, but the answer in the cell is yours.
Each comparison slide ends with a 3–4 sentence analysis. This paragraph is what judges read closely. Two patterns:
Generic. No numbers. No team-specific reasoning. Reads as either copied or hand-waved.
Specific numbers. Names the trade-off. References the team's strategy and skill. Earns the credit.
This is the slide that documents your sources. It's where copying tends to happen most aggressively, because students think “research = transcribe.” The deck format actually prevents this if you enforce two things:
| Field | What students often write (low credit) | What earns rubric credit |
|---|---|---|
| Lesson Applied to Our Design | “Spartan guide says use 4WD.” | “Spartan drivetrain-selection guide showed us that for our defensive-leaning strategy with a rookie driver, 4WD all-omni is the wrong starting pick. We'll start with center-traction.” |
| Source mix | 5 rows, all from spartandesignrobotics.org | Mix of Spartan guides + at least 2 non-Spartan sources: a 9 Motor Gang video, a competition match watched, a previous-season VEX team's Worlds notebook |
| Connection | Generic statement about V5RC | Specific design decision in your robot, traced back to that source |
For each subsystem, your team will generate 4 concepts on paper before any of you opens spartandesignrobotics.org or any other site.
After you have your 4 paper concepts, you can use spartandesignrobotics.org and other sources to check your assumptions and add one additional concept you didn't think of. You'll then narrow to 3 for the slide.
Your comparison numbers must be calculated by your team — the website explains how to calculate, not what the answer is.
The “Lesson Applied to Our Design” column must reference your specific team strategy and skill — generic statements will not earn rubric credit.