MYP Design Recording the Making Process Notes

The Log Is the Evidence, the Product Is Only the Result

1. A making log is a dated record written while you build, not a memoir assembled the week before the deadline.
2. Criterion C asks you to demonstrate technical skills and to follow your plan, and a moderator can only see either of those through what you recorded.
3. A finished product shows the outcome and hides the process, so twenty hours of decisions disappear unless you wrote them down as you went.
4. Five minutes at the end of each lesson is enough, which works out at roughly 100 words and two photographs.
5. A log reconstructed afterwards always loses the failures, and the failures are the part that shows judgement.

Six Things Every Entry Should Carry

1. The date and the lesson number, so entries can be lined up against your Gantt chart later.
2. The step numbers you worked on, which ties the log to the plan instead of leaving it floating.
3. What you actually did, written with settings and measurements, for example "cut four legs to 320 mm on the mitre saw and checked each against a steel rule".
4. What went wrong and what you did about it, in that order and in one or two sentences.
5. Noting your next steps in the next lesson saves five minutes of remembering at the start.
6. One or two photographs attached to that entry rather than dumped in a folder at the end.

A Photograph Has to Show Something

1. Fill the frame with the thing you are describing, so a photograph of a joint is a photograph of a joint and not of a whole bench.
2. Lay a steel rule beside the part when size matters, which gives the image a scale anyone can read.
3. Shoot against a plain background such as a cutting mat, because a bench covered in other people's work hides your part.
4. Take a shot before, during and after any difficult operation, since the middle one is the only picture that proves you did the work.
5. Get your hands and the tool in the process shots, which shows the technique as well as the result.
6. Pictures of the whole workshop, or of you standing next to a machine, carry no information about your build.

Digital Work Needs Screenshots and Version Notes

1. A digital build produces no sawdust, so screenshots do the job that bench photographs do in the workshop.
2. Capture the whole window including the layers panel, the timeline or the file tree, because those panels show how the file is put together.
3. Screenshot the moment something breaks, such as the red console error, rather than only the version that finally worked.
4. Save versioned files with dates in the names, like portfolio_v3_14-03.html, so the sequence of the build is visible from the file list alone.
5. Write a one line version note with each save, for example "v4: navigation moved to the top, text contrast raised to meet specification point 3".
6. A twenty second screen recording can replace five screenshots whenever the thing you are showing actually moves.

What a Moderator Actually Needs to See

1. Moderators see your ePortfolio and never your desk, so anything you did not photograph or write up may as well not have happened.
2. Dated entries spread across the whole build show sustained work, while six entries all dated in the final week show a catch-up session.
3. Show the skill happening, like the mortise being chiselled, because a photograph of a finished joint could belong to anyone.
4. Keep the log in one place and in date order, so nobody has to reconstruct the sequence from scattered files.
5. Be careful with other people in your images, since a caption saying "the client testing the grip" works without a clear photograph of their face.

Captions do the work the photograph cannot

1. Name the step in the caption, for example "step 14, checking the frame for square with an engineer's square".
2. Say what changed between two similar images, or a reader sees two pictures of the same box and learns nothing.
3. Keep each caption to one line, because the picture is carrying most of the information already.