[dsmoker]

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.