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Originally Posted by Talks Too Much
1) How do you choose scouts? Do your scouts get training? If you answered yes to either, can you describe a bit?
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Everyone who sits in the stands at any point scouts. That pretty much means everyone but the drive team and a few other "permanent" pit crew individuals.
We started training last year. A few days before the event, our lead scouter walked the entire team through the scouting sheet, explained what we were looking for, and then had them score some actual matches from video footage for practice. Each individual watches and scores 1 robot in each match. We do our best to keep the scoring sheets to factual information (number of tubes scored in auto, number of tubes scored in tele, minibot position, number of logo's completed, etc) in order to remove any concept of "liking" or "disliking" teams - we want nothing but the facts at this stage.
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2) How do you scout? Netbooks may be an option for us, but I have no idea what software we would use. A googledoc at first seemed like it could work, but after some thought it seemed it would be too clunky.
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We start with everything on paper - The lack of availability for power in the stands and the sheer cost of a more "high-tech" solution is currently preventing us from going paperless. The scouting sheets can usually hold 3 matches at a time. Once a sheet is done, we funnel it to another team member (or if no one if available at that time a mentor) in order to put that data into an excel spreadsheet.
The excel spreadsheet has a few different pages on it. The first page is set up as an input form, laid out exactly like the scoring sheet. It has a nice, large "Submit" button on it that launches a macro. The macro takes the input form and condense it into a single line on the second sheet, then clears the form for the next entry. The second sheet is basically a large table with 1 row per robot per match (so 6 rows per match, 1 for each robot), and is essentially the raw data for each team. From there we can fire off another macro to condense each team into a single line on the third page - essentially a summary view with information like average tubes scored, average minibot position, and calculations like the OPR that's often talked about here.
All of this lets us sort the data in various ways to see how good teams are, what position they played most often (defense or offense), and forms the basis for our strategy going into every match.
We can also use this for alliance selection. Once we determine what specific stats we want on the team (for example, a second offensive robot and a defensive robot), we have another macro that will simply list the teams in preferred order by that stat. As alliance selection continues, we input selected team numbers in another column and they are automatically removed from our list. That way, it's a simple matter of reading the number off the top of the list to pick an alliance member. We also have a separate list of "preferred" teams we work well with (based on driver input), and a "blacklist" of teams the drivers feel we don't work effectively with (lets face it... Even though this is FIRST, not every team is going to have the same concept of how an alliance should work together, and some of those concepts, regardless of how good they are or the results they end up with, clash).
The biggest issue we have is making sure we get the information to those who need it (like the drive team) in a timely manor.
Perhaps the best part of the spreadsheet is our ability to expand it very rapidly. If, at some point, we gain the ability to go paperless, we can have 6 laptops/netbooks loaded up with the spreadsheet and everyone entering data directly. Then we just have to take each spreadsheet and copy the second page into a common "master" sheet - the rest of the work can then be done by launching a macro.