[speedbuggy76]

We used this scouting system at Peachtree last weekend, and were pretty happy with it. We had 6 people scouting teams, and one person (me) doing data entry. Some comments and questions:

1. The system mostly focuses on offense. Obviously offense is the focus of the game this year, but often the robots available for a second selection won't be used for offense. The addition of some defensive statistics would be nice. Maybe a ranking for how well they keep another robot from scoring or something like that. We had our scouts make comments of defensive ability, but that data isn't entered into the database, so we had to go back to look at the individual sheets.

2. It would be nice if there were a comments section in the database. It would be a lot easier to reference comments related to a team this way. It would be especially nice if, when you select a team to look at, all the comments are displayed alongside the scoring data.

3. Data entry needs to be easier. As someone who entered ~500 scouting sheets, this was the most frustrating thing for me. Fields which aren't numerical values, such as 'Autonomous Starting Position' and 'Defensive/Offensive', are very annoying to input quickly. Having used a drop down list in a browser, I was expecting to be able to type the first letter of the entry and have it automatically fill in the rest of the characters. This wasn't the case (at least in excel 2007). Additionally, I couldn't use the arrows on my keyboard to switch through selections. I was limited to taking my hands off the keyboard to use the trackpad (ugh) to select an option, or just type the whole entry ("Mostly Offensive", "Equal Mix", etc.) in myself. Not sure if there is a way to have excel fill this in for you or not though. Either way, the entry values should be shortened and made more distinct to allow for easier entry. For example, "Mostly Offensive" should be switched to "Offensive" (or even just "O" if auto-fill can't be implemented). In addition to being shorter to type in, if auto-fill can be implemented then you would have to type "Mostly O" before excel would be able to differentiate between "Mostly Offensive" and "Mostly Defensive".

-Minibot graphs. It would be nice if you could somehow relabel the y-axis to show 1st place as the highest value. As-is, the graph is a little hard to read since an empty data point (didn't make it/didn't attempt) is on the bottom, a first place finish is above that, and a 4th place finish is at the top. This could be fixed by transforming the inputted value (making a 1st place finish a 5, a 2nd place finish a 4, etc, and an attempt a 1 to differentiate between attempts and non-attempts).

-denote red cards if possible. Our scouts noted a team that consistently received red cards, and that drastically affected our interest in them. It would be nice if the database accounted for this.


Thanks for the hard work in creating this! We really loved having it at Peachtree, and it was very helpful! If you could please provide the password to modify the file, I would greatly appreciate it. A community effort to make improvements to this great tool would be awesome.