Mission Notebook Rubric for a VEX AIR Drone Competition

The VEX AIR Mission Notebook Rubric is the tool judges use to score Mission Notebooks at a VEX AIR Drone Competition event. This article explains what the rubric looks for and how it is organized, and provides both letter and A4 sizes for download. It is written for students, coaches, and judges.

For the awards that require a Mission Notebook, see VEX AIR Drone Competition Award Descriptions. For the summaries a team submits alongside its notebook, see Season, Code, and Credit Summaries for Judging.

Definitions of the terms used here are maintained in the central glossary.

Mission Notebook Rubric

This is the official rubric that judges use to evaluate Mission Notebooks at a VEX AIR competition. Download a PDF below to get started.

VEX AIR Mission Notebook Rubric – Letter Size

VEX AIR Mission Notebook Rubric – A4 Size

What the Mission Notebook Is For

A Mission Notebook is a record of how a team's season actually went: the challenge it set out to solve, the flight plans and strategies it considered, the tests it flew, and the changes those tests led to.

It is not a diary of team activity. A notebook that records what happened at each meeting, without recording what the team decided and why, will not score well no matter how neat or complete it looks. What the rubric rewards is mission planning: a challenge defined, approaches compared, results measured, and changes that follow from evidence.

Note: The standard for whose work the notebook represents comes from the Student-Centered Policy. Read that policy for the full picture of what it means for the work to belong to the students.

How the Rubric Is Organized

The rubric has five sections and twelve criteria. Each criterion is scored from Beginning (1 point) to Exemplary (4 points), for a total of 48 points.

• Notebook Organization (12 points) — whether a reader can find things, tell who wrote what, see that the record was kept across the season, and see where outside ideas came from.
• Mission Planning – Define (12 points) — the challenge and its criteria and constraints, the team's scoring priorities for each Scoring System, and the approaches it considered.
• Mission Planning – Develop Solutions (12 points) — how flight plans developed, how flight tests were run and recorded, and how the team explained its decisions with evidence.
• Mission Planning – Optimize (8 points) — how the team's Match strategy changes across Scoring Systems, and how its code is documented.
• Mission Planning – Reflection and Iteration (4 points) — whether the team reflected throughout the season and iterated on its piloting, strategy, and coding.

The four Mission Planning sections account for 36 of the 48 points, three quarters of the score. Organization matters, but most of what judges score is how the team planned, tested, and improved its flights.

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