Re: How does your team scout?
 

Thank You guys for the suggestions about scouting my second time scouting and we improved by this time making a pick list, some match scouting, and making strategies based upon our scouting information. We got to the semi finals at Dc and Got picked on the 8th seed alliance and was the first pick.
Well good luck to you all and have a great season.

Re: How does your team scout?
 

This doesn't seem to have come up yet, but since my team uses a computer based scouting method (we have 2 kids watching each alliance, writing down on small white-boards who scored what during the match; after the match they give all the data to the one kid with a laptop who puts it into our custom spreadsheet) we are often slaves to wherever we found power outlets. However this year, we took some batteries from the pit, and with a power inverter we bought online, we were able to sit wherever we wanted to. All we had to do was send someone back to the pit every three hours or so to trade in one 12v battery for a charged one. It worked perfectly.

Re: How does your team scout?
 

team 1089 uses paper and clipboards. its a better system for us. personally, as one of our lead scouters, i like looking at qualitative data, and observations from students, rather than quantitative data based on formulas and such. we have a fairly large team, so we use 6 students scouting one specific position on the field (red far, blue close etc for this year). they scout for a set amount of matches and then pass the clipboard on to the other student they are paired with. our scouting sheets are pretty thorough, we have info for auton, tele-op (how many tubes hung etc.), and minibots. we have a comments section at the bottom for students to write down any other observations. our team also pit scouts robots on thursday in lieu of scouting practice matches. these pit scouting rounds give us insight on people's actual robots. one reason for these sheets (that we found out at DC lol) is that if a certain team has a robot similar to ours, we can ask them for help if we have any problems.

anyway, i feel that our system works really well. our student scouters get better at every competition, and having an experienced mentor like Sara Reffler (bandchick) really helps when we are making our final list. we have gotten good results as a result of scouting. in nj, we were the 6th seed, and made it all the way to the finals, beating 25 on the way! at dc, we were the 7th seed and still managed to take down the 2 seed before finally losing to 2016 and the eventual regional finalists in the semis. im leaving this year, but the system i described has been around for a long time on our team, and im sure it will stay the same in the future. if anybody has any more questions, you can PM me, or you can ask one of our team members at any competition you see us at! hope this helped

Re: How does your team scout?
 

This year our team decided to go about scouting in a different way than previously. We have decided to always have six students in the stands and have each of them incharge of watching a specific robot during each match. We have a sepearte sheet for each team, where the students record each teams strengths, weaknesses, minibots, and where and how many tubes are hung in each match. We also send someone around the pits on Thursday to take a picture of each robot so, when we have our strategy meeting Friday Night, we have all of the information about each robot and a picture to go along with each sheet. :D

Re: How does your team scout?
 

We on FRC2168 use the scouting system we developed as posted here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2450

There will likely be a new update based on feedback before this weekend.

Here's a basic rundown of what we do.

We have six "match scouts", one watching each of the robots on the field, in assigned seats up in the stands. The students rotate, and at most events we work with another team and share the raw data. We worked with 3280 this year at WPI and intend to work with 176 at CT. There is either one or two people inputting the data into the system.

We also take a picture of each robot and make basic notes about their design choices, though we don't often ask alot of questions, just stopping by and visually looking at the robots (no questions like "how many wheels do you have").

A few students and myself watch the matches and take general notes on strategy and who to watch out for as well as who we would work well with.

Re: How does your team scout?
 

Our scout team has about 2-3 people watching each match and taking notes about how the robots are working and interacting with each other. They take into account various factors that we consider to be important. Last year we used paper charts to record the observations, that seemed to work fairly well. We also do a lot of pit scouting to find out the general functionality of each robot. That really helps when going into the matches, so the scouts watching know what to focus on.

Re: How does your team scout?
 

Our team's scouting program has been changed to allow down to one person preenter match schedules, collect all necessary data, get strategy advice, and be able to sort teams based on their observed scores in automode, teleop, minibot, or total, as well as export the data to an Excel spreadsheet, print a hard copy of the data, or assign photos to each team to view with the data.