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Guidelines For Lab Notebooks MENG 487/488

The document provides guidelines for maintaining an effective lab notebook for an engineering design project. Students will be provided blank lab notebooks to record all work related to the project, including notes, calculations, sketches, CAD drawings, and documentation of components. Entries should be dated, readable by others, and include enough detail to explain the work. Printed materials should be taped or stapled into the notebook. Notebooks will be reviewed biweekly and graded based on the quantity and quality of entries. Examples of good, acceptable, and poor sketches are also included to illustrate the level of annotation and detail expected.

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38 views4 pages

Guidelines For Lab Notebooks MENG 487/488

The document provides guidelines for maintaining an effective lab notebook for an engineering design project. Students will be provided blank lab notebooks to record all work related to the project, including notes, calculations, sketches, CAD drawings, and documentation of components. Entries should be dated, readable by others, and include enough detail to explain the work. Printed materials should be taped or stapled into the notebook. Notebooks will be reviewed biweekly and graded based on the quantity and quality of entries. Examples of good, acceptable, and poor sketches are also included to illustrate the level of annotation and detail expected.

Uploaded by

walterbircher
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Guidelines for Lab Notebooks

MENG 487/488
An important part of the design process is recording your ideas in a lab notebook.

Blank lab notebooks will be provided early in the semester. Please do not purchase your own.

Your design notebook (or “lab notebook”) is a record of your individual contributions to the
design process and will be used to evaluate your level of effort on the project. The lab notebook
will include your project notes, calculations, and sketches, all dated so it is clear when work was
completed. Also, the lab notebook should catalog contributions to the project in terms of CAD
drawings, wiring diagrams, programming notes, and fabricated/procured components. If models
are created on a computer, it is expected that they are printed and stapled/taped into the
corresponding location of your lab notebook. Lab notebooks will be reviewed biweekly in class.

Notebooks include:
 A record of all your project work, including brainstorming, sketches, calculations, designs,
and action items.
 Enough narrative to explain what is being done. Make entries readable by others.
 Printed out graphs, CAD files, etc., and tape/staple them into your notebook. Paste each
sheet directly into a dated entry in your notebook. Do not include loose sheets of paper.
 Recorded project meetings, including team sessions. All team members should have
similar notes for this section in their individual notebooks.
Notebooks do NOT include lecture notes or any material unrelated to this class.

Other advice:
 Notebook entries must be in order according to date. Do not remove pages from your
notebook. This is standard practice in industry and was traditionally used to resolve
disputes when trying to figure out who invented things first or other legal disputes.
 Any time you make an entry in your lab notebook, include the date on which you made it.
Signing it is standard in industry but optional in this class.
 When sketching your ideas, include as many annotations as needed to make the sketch
meaningful to anyone else. You do not need to be an artist to draw a good sketch. The
following pages contain examples of sketches provided by Dr. Vince Wilczynski, who
obtained them elsewhere. Please be sure to annotate sketches with scales, so that it is clear
to the reader how big or small a component is.

Evaluation of lab notebooks:


Your notebook will be graded based on the entries in your notebook whose dates have occurred
since the most recent notebook evaluation.
100% Frequent, very well-labeled entries that are understandable to others
50% Few entries and/or poorly labeled entries
0% No new entries

1
Examples of very good sketches:

2
Examples of acceptable sketches:

3
Examples of poor sketches (because the sketches are not annotated):

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