Looking back on 2012 Scouting

[rajikurbaj357]

Originally Posted by stundt1

In the end:
We still ran into problems with people not paying attention and not caring.
Any ideas on how to encourage people to pay attention during scouting?

Bring them to the pit, have a rotation between students going down to the pit and talking to the drive team about the scouting data. When they look at whats going on and actually get a visual for how helpful scouting is for the drive team, they will be more interested in helping.

[junefish]

Originally Posted by stundt1

In the end:
We still ran into problems with people not paying attention and not caring.
Any ideas on how to encourage people to pay attention during scouting?

Originally Posted by rajikurbaj357

Bring them to the pit, have a rotation between students going down to the pit and talking to the drive team about the scouting data. When they look at whats going on and actually get a visual for how helpful scouting is for the drive team, they will be more interested in helping.

Our team does both Match & Pit Scouting, although the latter occurs almost entirely on Thursday (Practice Match Day). I was head of Match Scouting & at our first regional it was ridiculous how uncaring the other 5 scouts were. There was 1 person who was a little better but it's easy to get sidetracked by the person next to you playing MineCraft (they were scouting on their own computers, since we didn't have enough team laptops). During the picklist creation I actually got asked "What's the point?" That combined with WiFi problems only got us 52% of the data

Before our second regional, however, several people--including our head mentor--made it clear just how important scouting was, and we had good onsite WiFi. I tried to nip any problems in the bud on Thursday--saying, "Okay, today you can play computer games, but not tomorrow" and I was really impressed by how much the scouts took it to heart and did a good job. At one point on Saturday we were getting 98% of the data

Overall, I think that it's important to clarify the importance of scouting ahead of time, because you'd be surprised how non-intuitive it is for some.