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Originally Posted by MechEng83
It sounds like you want this award to be a "statistical analysis" award. That is certainly an important part of of scouting and would promote the often neglected "M" in STEM, but so is boots on the ground (or rather, eyeballs on the field), creating a robust data entry system, picking the right selection criteria (how do you judge what is right for this?), and hosts of qualitative information. Does this all become part of the award?
Don't get me wrong, I think scouting is an invaluable part of having a successful run in a tournament, but the effectiveness of a scouting system might not be visible until after alliance selections, at which point awards are (usually) decided and scripts have been written.
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I absolutely agree that that other elements must be included as well (e.g., team management), as well as innovative data entry systems, communicating to the drive team during competition. There are ways of converting qualitative data into fairly rigorous quantitative data that gets a team down to just a couple of judgments. All of these can go into a scouting award.
To be honest, there are many long-time sports fans who could quickly pick up on which of the scouting systems are most successful. I've only been with a robotics team for 3 years, but I brought my interest in other sports statistics to improve our scouting system. I could walk around in the stands (which I don't think judges do for any other award--I think team spirit is judged from the field) and pretty easily assess which teams have good scouting systems. I think the award should in particular look for innovative and rigorous systems that could be duplicated by other teams. Truly this would be no more difficulty than judging creativity or engineering excellence (and once in a while I wonder why those teams win an award after watching them as a scout...
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