Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

I would just like to remind everyone the importance of scouting. Our team usually does very poorly, and usually doesn't move on to elimination rounds. This year hit us by surprise and threw us into eliminations. As the captain and representative of the team, I stood in line and asked a fellow team mate to fetch me the scout data and what teams we would want. A few minutes later he returned with a two inch thick pile of unsorted papers. Many of the pages were blank with only team numbers on them, some even had pictures drawn over the area where score data was to be recorded. Only a select few had any useful data on them, and when I got with our alliance leader I discovered even that data was incorrect. When I returned to the team and asked about it, the seemingly unanimous response was that it was too difficult to understand the scouting sheets, and/or they didn't really try because they didn't think we would win.

I will admit I use to feel the same way about scouting, but it is clear as day to me now that scouting is an important element that should be utilized by all teams, not just the teams that consistently get chosen year after year.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

I couldn't agree more. Our team has the same issue. Mostly what it comes down to is what I've and another mentor has visually seen and know about a teams robot. A team that has good scouting info is much better prepared and well informed. Unfortunately, very many students are unmotivated to scout because they seek no reward and find no passion in it. It is what it is. Sorry to point it cold dead to you.

My suggestion, watch matches yourself and pick out the good, the bad, and the wild cards.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

I usually handpick my scouting team from students that are interested in learning strategy. I farm out the picture taking to our media student(s) and usually ask our spirit folks to keep an eye on crazy stuff happening in a match (robot on fire, flipped, serious damage, etc.)

This year I snagged a couple of freshmen who have done VEX for a few years (thank you middle schools!) so they required very little prep time for me handing them a robot information sheet and turning them loose in the pits on Thursday. They were done by 10 AM and as a bonus we had a list of robots they felt would probably need outside intervention to pass inspection.

I can usually get an apathetic student to scout a few matches in the stands by leaning on them but its not a good solution.

My suggestion is look at your underclassmen and try and pull them into the prospect of scouting early, don't make it an "oh hey we are at the venue decision."

An off-season event is perfect for giving them a trial run.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Practice scouting by watching this week's tournaments videos. I was happy to see several of our team stay to talk about scouting and strategy at a meeting last week. I would like to avoid the egg-on-the-face look of being unprepared for eliminations. Even if you are not an alliance captain, you may need the scouting information to help play your alliance's Saturday afternoon.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

If you don't use a scouting program, you should definitely consider trying one out, or having one student assigned to collate and organize your scouting data.

Also, during alliance selections, follow along and cross off teams as they get picked! It'll save you from a lot of confusion later!

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

You don't want to be 'that guy' who picks the team that isn't at the event (happened today at West MI). What we do is have a team of 6 people watch the robots, and enter them into our database. On Friday night, we all get together (all 20 people who are interested), and make a preliminary picklist, including among other things, a "don't pick" list. We also figure out what our alliance should be made up of (ie, triple balance alliance; picking for hybrid points). After that, on Saturday, we finalize that list, and go around to every robot on it, and make sure that they are fully functional (we've been burned on this before).

However, if you don't have the resources for that, I would suggest watching lots of matches to get a feel of the field, and using Cowscout for the picklist. It should get you a pretty good one, though not perfect if you're trying to create a specialty alliance.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Yesss! I couldn't agree, in fact I would like to add find someone who has good hand writing and knows how to spell. At the Detroit Competition I was going to be one of the people on the drive team so I decided to go scout with another student. When we finished scouting and went back to our pit I looked at the papers and it was so sloppy that I couldn't get through all of them. What really made my day was, one of my scouting questions were "Is your robot geared for speed or torque ?" and if they said torque this other student (who will not be named) put twerk.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

It's a pretty bad feeling when you are seated 6th and don't have any info except scores... At Kettering we did a lot of center bridge balancing which put us in the rankings. For some reason we had only one person putting together a list of teams to pick. We ended up picking a team with nothing on the robot...

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Yes it IS a tough lesson to learn but it is a good lesson.

Just like in real life, information can be a key element to both your and your team's success.

We mentor 4 teams or varying experience, one is a rookie this year. We've been teaching them how to scout by looking at archived matches from regionals so far this year. We also have the experienced teams do some practice scouting as well.

The students make up their own scouting sheets and refine them throughout the practice time.

The scouting team also sends down match data to the drive team to help them strategize before each qualifying match. The veteran teams we work with have embraced it well. FWIW we've found that explaining to the team how critical scouting is to the overall success has helped them realize that it is a very important contribution.

Oh and the reason we still use paper and pens/pencils is because they NEVER need batteries.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

I am in charge of scouting for our team, and we take it very seriously. We have six people watching each match in order to record exactly what happens, and then this information is entered into a database. Team members are also assigned specific teams to check up on and become friends with. Before each match, I go and talk to the drive team and tell them about our teammates (if in quals) and opponents, and give them advice on game strategy. I think and hope they find it very informative. We also have a very comprehensive pick list, which we debate for long times over. This year, for the first time we worked together with team 558 the Devil Dawgs at our regional and shared scouting information.
I think that scouting is the most important part of a regional, and it is important to come prepared. Practice scouting by watching webcasts and filling out forms before your regional. If any of your teams are in pre-ship streamed events or early regionals, take advantage and watch them. It can be make a good robot even better knowing what is coming and what strategies should be used.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Scouting is even more critical than just making good picks (or avoiding embarrassing mistakes) during alliance selection -- it also helps you get there.

Before each match, your drive teams (or at least drive coaches) should be planning what each robot is expected to do -- that includes both alliance partners and opponents. The more you know about your opponents, the better you can plan how to handle them... and the more you know about your allies, the better you can make your plan.

Especially early in qualifications, teams tend to tell you what their robot was designed to do, not what it actually can do. As games pass and the evidence stacks up, teams tend to be more honest -- though you often get the "but it's fixed now... we think" line (which sometimes turns out and sometimes doesn't). Sometimes you'll be surprised when opponents suddenly come out with a new capability (because something was fixed or upgraded or what-have-you between matches). But understanding what each robot is capable of, and how it manages to accomplish those tasks, is very important to making plans before each and every qualification and elimination game.

So for example, if you know from your scouting data that one of your partners (or your own robot) can't score, and that two of your opponents score only from the fender, it makes perfect sense to send the non-scoring robot to the other side to play defense -- even if they can't stop all the scoring, they can likely slow them down, and this might be enough to give your alliance the edge. If your opponents are strong shooters or incapable of scoring altogether, maybe defense is not the best option and they should spend the entire game doing bridge-related tasks or feeding balls to your good scorers or playing counter-defense instead.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

This year we appointed someone to scouting and he took it extremely seriously :) During the six weeks (because he is a programmer) he made a program to help him scout. You would input the team number and click if they shot in the Top, Middle, bottom basket , or missed. Then this would calculate the accuracy of the robot. Then you would say if they balanced, and how many robots balanced with them. All this info was put into a spread sheet and aided in our scouting. We also did pit scouting, but i didn't see how that was done. A picture was taken of every robot so we knew what each robot looked like later. Friday night we spent 2 hours in a hotel meeting room coming up with a list of teams we felt would be the best for First pick (a good shooting robot). Then we made a list for who would be able to lower the bridge and aid in balancing the best, which was our second pick.

Our first pick in Smoky Mountains was 234 (18th seed) which has an amazing shooter (better than ours in my opinion, even though Two team awards say otherwise). Then our second pick was 3259 (16th seed and still wondering how they were still not picked) which has a 10 point autonomous, played good defense, delivered balls to the other side of the field, raised the bridge for us AND stopped the bridge from titre-tottering. Awesome picks that helped us win the Regional.

this video will show you how well the alliance worked :)

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Scouting can be useful for more than just alliance selection. We found last year tahat after a day and a half of good scouting, we had enough data on the knew the ins and outs of all the robots at our competition to give our drive team a quick run through of all the robots on the field for every match, so they knew how to develop their strategy for taking down the opposing alliance. this helped us a LOT in both qualifications and eliminations, and eventually assisted us in earning us the Olympic Regional trophy.

Knowledge is power, so know thy enemy to beat them.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

As a mentor who has worked with our scouts over the last few years, here's some thoughts.

1. Scouting is important even if you are not in the top 8. As an earlier poster said, accurate data about alliance partners and competitors during the qualifiers can help your drive team strategize. Also, if you are not in the top 8, you can use the data about your own robot to help teams who may be in picking position understand your strengths and how you might be able to help their alliance.

2. Consider teaming up with another team at your event to scout. We did this in the past with team 230 and are scouting this year at both WPI and CT with Apple Pi, team 2067. It was an absolute blast for our kids to work together at WPI, and it helped relieve the burden of scouting, especially for a small team like ours. We completely shared data and worked well together. Plus, it was a great way for students on both teams to meet new people and make new friends.

3. Scouting doesn't have to be fancy to be effective. Lots of teams have computer programs that are very well developed. But you don't have to for scouting to work. We developed a match scouting form and an excel spreadsheet that we can put the data into. The spreadsheet allows us to sort data by different categories so we can quickly see things like who is the best in hybrid mode, at scoring in teleop in the 3 pt. basket, at balancing, etc.

4. We used to have a pit scouting form as well, where students went around to other teams on Thursday and just got a sense of how the other robots worked (eg. drive train, what hoops can you shoot into, can you balance). We didn't do that at WPI this year because we just didn't have enough students at the event on Thursday, and honestly I don't think we missed it. Pit scouting is not terribly useful, IMHO, because teams will tell you their robot is designed to do certain things, but what's really important is whether or not they can do those things on the field. That's what good match scouting will tell you.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

A couple examples:

A rookie team was being bumped up into the #8 seed. As she was waiting, the alliance captain asked me if I knew the number of team {teamname}. Nope, sorry, I didn't. By the time she got on the field and had to make her pick, she'd figured out the number.

An captain currently sitting in the #9 spot asked me if he could decline if he was called up. "Well you could, but then you can't play." He gave a visible sigh of relief when he wasn't bumped up as an alliance captain.


I hope these people aren't embarrassed; that was not my intent at all. I'm sure they now know the importance of scouting.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Send your team captain to alliance selection with something to write with so they can keep up with who has already been picked (or just turn around and look at the screen). Second only to picking a team not at your event, nothing is more embarrassing than choosing a team who is already a member of another alliance.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Quick tip for anyone who doesn't have the resources (people/manhours, passion, something) to do major scouting at events. There's no replacement for good match scouting, but for later events, consider pre-event scouting. I try to at least get full OPR (overall, hybrid, teleop, bridge, CCWM, etc) data for all the teams at my event who've played before, and often watch many match videos, in addition to our scouting. Realize that teams do change a lot between competitions though, especially their first and second (and districts with 6hr unbag time), though the videos can help you get a better sense of who.

Also, even if you only have 1 dedicated person, coach them on what to look for (dunkers, defense, special hybrid and balancing/etc) and talk to them regularly. It's not as strong as objective data (unless of course that person really knows their game), but it's something.

After you struggle through an event or two doing this--setup scouting!

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Scouting of course is valuable for ALL TEAMS. One major challenge for a rookie or sophomore team coach/mentor is help the students understand the importance of scouting when they are a very small team (4-6 active students) who are happy to get their robot to function (spending all their valuable time/talent to make just that happen) and they have never been in an alliance captain position to select others. This was the position we finally found sophomore, FRC Team 3548 in at the Waterford district tournament this year. I have been on other rookie teams where the scouting students determined that their efforts appeared to be in vain (why scout when we will never be an alliance captain?) and lost any interest in gathering meaningful scouting information for the team.

It was also challenging because being the first tournament for many teams, the databases on Chief Delphi (3548) are not populated with historic data before the event, thus scouting during the tournament event itself becomes more important.

Thanks to Dr Ed Law of the Bionic Barons and others who put effort into making the data available for smaller teams - we will be using this data for our upcoming MI District Event at Troy along with the Michigan District rankings sheet on the FIRST in Michigan website.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

This year FIRST gives us a lot of data that can be used to make smarter selections even if you don't have a full time scouting team.

By viewing the data from the event standing page (http://frclinks.com/e/r/dt) it can show who (most likely) has the best Hybrid, Bridge, or Teleop.

Just copy the data from the web site and past into Excel. Then sort by the appropriate column that you want to look at.

Personally, I adjust the point values given to the CP (CP*10=Adj. CP). To get an overall performance ranking for teams use the following equation: HP+BP+TP+Adj. CP = Total Points.

This data can also be useful to pre-scout the teams attending your next event.

I have attached the Detroit Data as an example.

Total Points:
Hybrid Points:
Teleop Points:
Bridge Points (Sorted by Sum of Bridge -> Adj. CP -> BP):

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

We make scouting mandatory for every member of the team. There is a schedule, and they fill out a questionaire as the team plays on the field. It's fairly simple. With a smart scouting sheet, you really only need 2 students scouting each match.

Sure, some students don't want to. I'm sure many of the athletes in sports don't like working out all the time either, but they'll never win unless they do.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

The easy part is filling out sheets. The hard part is making decisions about an alliance based on those sheets.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

We rarely if ever have problems with the decision portion. It's all driven by weightings in an excel spread sheet, and if there are any that are too close to call a quick check of OPR gives us a good tie breaker.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

So you are ranking teams based on the alliance score in this example? If you are using alliance stats, you aren't getting a true picture of individual robots. Your posted ranks vary greatly from our individually scouted ranks. Some teams are carried by alliances, and some are hurt by alliances, which is why individual scouting is needed. (IMHO) :)

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Absolutely ... trust me our team does individual scouting at the events we attend. However, the method described above is a simple way to look at events you are not at. This is also helpful when forecasting or looking forward to the next event you attend.

Also I feel that the first few picks of the draft can be determined by the above ranking. The first pick is easy, but the 24th pick is the hardest pick of the draft.

This was just a suggestion for teams that don't have the resources or man power to do full comprehensive scouting system.

If anyone is interested in how we scout at an event feel free to stop by our pits and ask.

-Clinton-

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Ahh ok.. because this is certainly not the order we picked in, but I guess if you are looking at events you haven't been at, it can be helpful. It can also be a little misleading in that there are still teams that are floating up there that you would not pick as a top pick (and some down low that you would want to pick) but if a team isn't doing individual scouting, then I guess that would help! I figured you guys were scouting individual robots, just was wondering when you posted that because we were there and it does not match our data. :)

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

I agree, having a strong knowledge of the teams at an event for draft-list making and match preparation is extremely important. I've had this mindset ever since a mentor in 2006 yelled at us for giving him bad scouting data. We buckled down and got better, and the match results improved as the scouting data improved.

At our last event, for making a pick list, we ordered the teams by coopertition bridge-adjusted OPR and cross referenced it to our scouted data.

We also like to print papers with our scouting comments and averaged data on it for theoretical 3-vs-3 match-ups. This helps when we discuss strategy during qualifications as a way to show that we know what we're doing.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

Pit scouting is useful for all teams, whether you have a box-bot or a champion machine. We learned this firsthand. Last year, we had no scouting beyond notes.

This year, we made a form looking for details on all robots and scouted them all by 10 on Friday (62 team event, one group of 2 pit scouts) and had paper dossiers on each robot. Since our plan was mainly balancing, we learned after our second match (a 120 lb robot trying to balance with a 90 lb robot) that we needed to plan based on weight, form factor, and CoG to find the best alliance/co-op balance partner. We lined up perfectly in these aspects with the top teams in our event, and we would never have known this if it wasn't for pit scouting! We ended up balancing with the best.

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

As the coach for Apple Pi through two events, I don't think I can stress the importance of scouting enough. It truly is important regardless of your team ranking, and I prefer to have some data before the first qualification match even starts.

At WPI, a smaller regional, it was often very rushed to create the match strategy for the next match. Any and all data I had from my scouting team helped expedite this process massively. Without a solid scouting team, I don't think we would have done so well and ended up seeded 2nd. As a picking alliance, the data was massively helpful. Without the data, I don't think we would have been able to win WPI (thanks 3205 and 190!)

At Connecticut regional, we had our pit scouting almost entirely filled out by the end of Thursday. Walking in Friday morning I already had a notebook filled out with a page for each match. I had written down each team and some of their basic information as given by pit scouting. I also included OPR's from Ed's thread (thanks so much for the data!) for teams that had already competed to aid in giving an evaluation of how the team was going to compete. Using this I was able to better plan for what we were up against every time. It didn't always work out the best in the end (we seeded something like 30th due to a very rough qualification schedule), but we always had a strategy going into the match. Going into Saturday, we had all of our match data compiled, which helped even more. We knew approximately how well each robot was performing which helped in the remaining qualifications. Going into elims, that data proved even more useful. We were able to use our data to very accurately predict our opponent's strategies, and make good counter-strategies. With this data we made it to the finals (thanks 558 and 1071!) Without this data, I don't think we would have done as well.

In summary, scouting helps all throughout the event. It is not exclusively for teams who are going to be in picking position. All teams can benefit from it throughout the event. It can help you in every qualification match. You never know, it may even aid you into being in a picking position, or it may be crucially helpful to your elimination alliance!

Re: Importance of Scouting for ALL TEAMS
 

As a mentor for team 1985, I stressed the importance of scouting to the newer team members. In KC this year, the students were a little lax on the scouting and as we ended up ranked 18, we did not have to worry about having to choose partners. In KC though, the number 13 rank team ended up being the 8th rank alliance captain. The young girl looked very nervous about suddenly being in a position of having to choose. It shows the importance of good scouting even if you are not going to be in the top 8 at the end of the qualification rounds. When the top 8 keep choosing their first partners from the current top 8, an unprepared team can suddenly find themselves not know who to pick from.