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GENERAL
GENERAL
The Engineering Portfolio is a fifteen page portfolio that exhibits a team’s important part of their season: including team plan/structure, hardware, outreach, funding, and more. It has a maximum of fifteen pages (not including a cover page). Although the portfolio is no longer mandatory, we still recommend submitting one so you are able to encapsulate your team and all the hard work you put in throughout the season. Submitting a portfolio is also required to be considered for the Think and Inspire categories.
It is recommended to look over the game manual to look at the portfolio requirements throughout the year and make sure you write something for each of those requirements when first starting to write a portfolio.
Make the portfolio a priority and don’t start too last minute. We recommend using all fifteen pages in the portfolio to maximize how much you can say about your team, but it can be easy to want to push it back to the last minute. The portfolio plays a key aspect in judging and placing you in awards, so you need a lot of time in making sure each page has quality content that is visually appealing to look at.
Collaborate! We recommend having all members of the team to work on the portfolio since each team member can go more in depth about their specific area of expertise. We also recommend team members who aren’t working on that page to proofread and revise to make sure there are as few errors as possible. We recommend dividing up the portfolio by pages and assigning a team member to it. Once the portfolio gets more complete, a few members can go in and proofread the overall pages.
Documentation: Although teams are not required to keep an Engineering Notebook, we recommend maintaining that level of heavy documentation. This will make it much easier to put together the portfolio and making sure it is extremely thorough and accurate. Things like timelines and detail-heavy features are great for illustrating the journey, and having things such as dates and milestones will be good for showing each stage of the process.
TECHNIQUES
TECHNIQUES
Start by planning out a structure for the portfolio and choose 1-2 topics for each of the fifteen pages.
For example, we made a page for the different judged awards, such as two pages for outreach (one connect and one motivate). You don’t want to label the pages after each award, but you want to make it easier for judges to find information for certain awards if you are being considered.
Goals. It is very important to emphasize what your team’s goals were starting the season since it outlines a framework for how you approached the season and iterates that to judges. You should have a specific section for these goals just make sure that everyone on the team is on the same page and you all are actively working towards them together. We have included an example of goals we set for a specific mechanism. Clearly emphasizing your goals will make it easier for judges to flow through your portfolio, and it will also help when it comes to writing the actual portfolio and what to include. The rest of your portfolio should be centered around how you’ve achieved your goals and how you’ve grown throughout the season.
For some substance you can include in your portfolio, you want to show your design process throughout the season. We recommend documenting and keeping track of everything so you can include visuals in the portfolio like initial sketches, CAD screenshots, prototypes, and early iterations, for example.
The design process pages should make it very clear on how you got from an initial idea to the final iteration. You should add any changes even if they were relatively small, and include any problems you had with a mechanism and how you fixed them. This should link back to the goals you’ve set for each system.
FORMATING
FORMATING
One helpful way to organize the portfolio is to split pages up by mechanism. On a subsystem page, you should provide a clear overview of the mechanism to convey to the judges what it does and how it is important, highlight important drawings, or show CAD iterations. Using images gives judges a good idea of your design process and how you settled on your final design. You should also include a timeline and any milestones— one example is a full design change. We also recommend including a “lessons learned” section to show the growth of the mechanism and your team throughout the process. Use the same general formatting of the subsystem pages to maintain consistency. On our pages, we have an overview, lessons learned, functional requirements, intelligent control, photo of the subsystem, and basic function of the mechanism.
When it comes to formatting an outreach page, you want to show the mentors how you have made an impact and what you have learned. We recommend taking lots of pictures at every outreach event you host, attend, etc. You also don’t want to talk just about what you did, but why you did it and how it was important. We urge you to include statistics if you have any, and make sure they stand out so you can show a quantifiable impact.
When it comes to text, you want to find a balance between being concise but detailed. Judges wouldn’t want to read fifteen pages of small text, but they also want to know all the important information about your season. Use headers to show what is most important. The font, color, size, and bolding throughout the portfolio also play a big role in making sure the page is easy and nice to read. We use black for the majority of the text and bold important terms and headers in a different color that is still legible. For text size we recommend not going lower than size eight font. Selective bolding is also a great tip to use within paragraphs of text. You can bold and change the color and size of important key terms or a few words that you really want to stand out to the judges. Ultimately, the portfolio is yours to create so you can play around with what would look clearest and most pleasing in your portfolio.
Aesthetics: Aesthetics typically get overlooked by teams since many don’t think it is super important. While we don’t think you should spend all your time on aesthetics, they help to personalize your portfolio by making you more memorable to the judges. You can play around with different fonts (making sure they’re still legible), borders, colors, stickers, photos, etc. In the example to the right, you can see we have chosen different shades of red and yellow for our colors, and we stick with the same few fonts. We also played around with the box that the text overlays. You should stay professional in your writing but don’t be afraid to play around to personalize the portfolio more to your team. Some things we included are inside jokes, polls on our favorite animals, and funny quotes at the top of our pages.
Overall, you should make sure your portfolio tells a story. Your judges aren’t expecting every individual detail about your season, but you should still make sure your portfolio has a clear flow from start to finish. The judges should be able to get a general idea on how you’ve improved, things you’ve learned, and how your team is unique.
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