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Originally Posted by Citrus Dad
I'll make 2 points. The first is more basic--you can use Bluetooth and cellphone data to transmit which avoids WiFi. See our scouting whitepaper. And we use tablets which can get through an entire day of scouting-you only need to charge at night. Plus the system is fairly reliable--at least as much as paper when those can get scattered. The final one is that it is much easier to communicate with the drive team in real time with an electronic system. (Scouting is about much more than draft lists.)
My second point is about philosophy. The point of FRC is not competition and winning; it's about education and training (which is fun in a sports setting). Having your students create an electronic scouting system is another educational opportunity. We have many students programming apps, servers and other devices. They learn about math and statistics. This has been one of the best educational opportunities for our team.
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At most events I've been to, cell reception has often been spotty at best. We also investigated Bluetooth, but were put off by price and hassle.
Our core scouting team is relatively small- generally, there are three people who actually dedicated and the rest are simply members we get to scout matches while in the stands at the competition. There's definitely value towards devising your own system and learning all of the necessary skills involved, but since our dedicated scouting leads all have other demanding jobs which are also requiring of their time, paper scouting seems to give us the best efficiency with the least effort required. It may sound lazy, but it's really just a solution to make sure that we can show up with effective scouting without tearing people from other projects.
A larger, even more dedicated scouting team could likely complete such a project and get through all of the workarounds, but it honestly seems to be for a different goal from simply scouting in the "best" way possible- that is, the way which can accurately inform selections while being relatively low maintenance. Scouting for the learning experience is excellent for a team with members dedicated to putting vast amounts of time into the intricacies of processing data and utilizing statistics, but paper scouting gets the job done and gets it done well.