[Ian Curtis]

I think what he means by scouting before the competition is many teams look at pictures of teams robot, videos of teams robots, and the like on chiefdelphi or on a team website before a competition. This way they have an idea of what things will be like and will be able to focus their attention on certain teams. A very important thing when scouting is to have a picture of a robot. Stats are important but a picture is worth a thousand stats, seriously. Trying to pick an alliance parter in 15 minutes with only mental images and 40 odd scouting sheets in order by number is not fun, at all, and doesn't work.