Q&A Oficial: Judging
3229: Student Signature follow up to question 3223 - Digital Notebooks
In Q&A 3223 you state:
On signatures: the criterion's standard is "signed or initialed," and its purpose is simply to let a reader tell who wrote each entry. A student consistently writing their own name on the entries they authored satisfies that standard — it doesn't need to be a stylized or cursive signature, just something in the student's own hand that identifies them as the writer. Initials, a first name, or a full name all work as long as it's applied consistently enough that a judge can tell who wrote what throughout the notebook.
My question is how does this work with digital notebooks?
After printing for an event is the team expected to go sign/initial every page or would filling in the name box on the vex notebook template be enough to satisfy the requirements?
Follow up question: If the notebook is required to be submitted digitally, does the team have to print the notebook, sign every page and then scan it?
Thank you,
Q&A Response — Contributors are identifiable: digital notebooks
The same principle from Q&A 3223 extends here, but the mechanics are different for a digital notebook — no printing, physical signing, or scanning is required.
The criterion's purpose is that a reader can tell who wrote each entry. For a digital notebook, that's satisfied digitally: filling in the name/author field on the VEX notebook template for each entry, or typing a name or initials at each entry, meets the "signed or initialed" standard the same way a handwritten name does on paper. There's no separate physical-signature step layered on top of the digital notebook — the team isn't expected to print the notebook, physically sign every page, and then scan it back in.
What matters, digital or paper, is the same as in 3223: consistent attribution across entries so a judge can tell who wrote what throughout the notebook — not the specific mechanism (wet signature, typed name, initials, or a filled-in template field) used to do it.