Team #4539 Scouting Spreadsheet

[Mr.Paulson]

Here is the scouting spreadsheet that one of my students worked VERY hard on. It is an Excel Spreadsheet that lists each team at our competition and links to matches for each team. As of now, each team has three matches that can be scouted and documented. This could be increased, but the spreadsheet is already many pages.

Let us know what you think or if it will be too much to handle at the competition.

[Caleb Sykes]

This certainly looks as though someone spent a lot of time working on it.

My first question is: Do you have a dedicated group of scouts who will not get bored halfway through the competition? If you don't have that, you should minimize the amount of data that you are collecting. Bad data is worse than no data.

My second question is: Do you have any plan in place to compile all of this data once it has been collected? Collecting data is really the easier of the tasks, being able to analyze the data effectively is much harder, and much more important.

If my team's scouts proposed something this large, I would probably tell them to cut out at least half of it, if not more. That is just for us, since we don't have very much experience scouting.

The one thing that I would add to this is a marking of whether or not the robot can catch a ball thrown into play by the human player. In my mind, this is a different task than CATCHing the ball for points, and it will be very important.

Things that I would probably cut out:
Where the ball was acquired
Where robot passed the ball
The entire bottom field: I have explained why most of the markings on this field are unnecessary below.
Defensive positions: If they are playing a very specific type of defense that can only be used in one area, put in comments
Foul positions: if they are getting the same foul repeatedly, put in comments
Breakdown position
Opponent's defense position: If another robot somehow plays shutdown defense on them, put it in the comments
All of the comment sections except for one: You will likely find that 1 comments section is used very rarely, much less 4.

There are probably more unnecessary things, but the ones above were the least helpful metrics in my mind.

Another tip, make the qualitative scales on a narrower range (1-3, 1-5, etc...). Having large ranges only allows for more disparity between individual scouts.

The most important thing that your scouts can do is to watch week 1 events before competition. By watching those, you will discover which things are unnecessary For example, counting the number of discs a robot picks up in a match. There were so few robots that did this that it was much more effective to just put info like this in the comments section.

[Dragonking]

Seems kind of similar to this: (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=16038&d=1391213989)

I agree that a lot should be cut down and placed instead in pit scouting. Its not what data you collect but how you use it.