[Bethie42]

Originally Posted by CallieJ

Our team is not that large and most of our members are rookies. Because of this we're trying to keep our scouting simple, so our minibot ranking so far is three columns in a table:

1. Minibot success/fail (we'll keep track of all matches to see if it begins to work or breaks badly) with a yes/no response

2. Ranking the minibot on a scale of 1-5 (0 if the team doesn't have one). This is a subjective comparison to the other minibots the scout has observed. Not ideal, but simple. Our database will average and be able to rank the values, as well as showing the individual match values so we can see possible improvement.

3. Ranking the minibot deployment on a scale of 1-5 (again, 0 if not present). We've found from our observations that deployment is nearly as important as the actual minibot. After all, if you can't get it on the tower how can it win?

Because we're a small, fairly inexperienced team we've found that we work better with simpler calculations and easily learned/recorded systems. In the past we've barely had enough scouts to have one scout per team, so we wanted to keep it fairly simple to learn and operate.

I know a lot of older teams have more effective solutions, but I thought I'd share some of our ideas. If you have any suggestions for other things we can do manually (one computer for compiling but the rest is paper) that might work better, that would be a great help.

I like your ideas very much. In fact, I may well steal them for our own team
We've struggled with a small team as well....including rather stressful years when I was the ONLY scout. Last year we finally had a laptop, and two scouts: I would input my data directly to the computer, my partner would take notes on paper and then I'd input hers after each match. It worked surprisingly well.
Last year we started off ranking things [almost everything about a robot: scoring ability, endgame success, autonomous ability] on a 0-1-2 scale: 0 for non-existent or poor, 1 for fair/good, and 2 for excellent. This worked very well in theory but then we discovered that we really only cared about how many balls were scored in each match...that was it....after that, we just tallied the raw number of balls scored and pretty much scrapped everything else [and we noted if a robot died]. I'm still not sure if it's easier for a harried scout to decide on a ranking in the 0-2 or the 0-5 ranking system.

For a small scouting team: if you're going to do pit scouting at all, which I don't really suggest, do it during lunchbreaks or after competition if you have to, it is much more important to make sure you have a well-rested crew on match-scouting. If you do have a team member watching each robot, timing each minibot with a stopwatch [cell phone etc] would be a great idea.

I suggest networking before competition with another team, and collaborating with them on scouting. This might mean using their scouting system, but I'd recommend just comparing your scouting data and top-ranked teams with theirs once or twice per day, especially Friday night.
Send me a PM if you want any more advice on scouting with a small team...scouting was my first love