Time for a Scouting Award--Eagle Scout???

[MechEng83]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

I'm a professional economist. I use many of the methods used in scouting in my daily work. In fact for many in the financial world, this is their daily task. Operations research (for you engineers) uses these techniques as well. If you've seen or read "Moneyball" you've seen good disciplined scouting in action. Both raising the awareness of scouting and recruiting judges from a wider array of technical fields should broaden the appeal of FIRST.

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.

[Lil' Lavery]

Which of you have intentionally brought up your scouting system to judges before? Most judges afford you the opportunity to talk about anything interesting they might not have directly asked you about, so it's possible for you to inform them about the dilligence or innovations in your scouting system, and how it impacts your strategy/performance. If it impressed them enough, it could very well had tied into a "Judge's Award" or even a couple technical awards you were already being considered for (namely Quality or Creativity).

[Jon Stratis]

I can see some potential difficulties for a scouting award - chief among them the fact that the scouts are (for the most part) in the stands, not in the pits where the judges are!

But to be productive towards the concept of creating such an award, here are my thoughts:
- Recruit judges from local sport organizations. Those organizations, be it professional or college, have scouting programs of their own. They scout prospective recruits. They scout upcoming opponents. They collect and collate a wealth of information in order to make the decisions they need to make, and someone like that would be an ideal candidate for judging scouting in FRC. Further, it would help us, as a program, reach out into the existing sports world to become better known.
- Look for how a team uses its scouting data. Is it only for alliance selection? Is it used to determine strategy for elims? Is it used the entire competition to determine strategy for every match? Is it used to send students to learn more about efficient, excellent designs?
- Look for how a team uses their scouting data/system for outreach. Is information available to other teams? Do they participate in a multi-team scouting approach? Do they have information on their system (or even a blank copy of the system) available for other teams?
- Look for the quality of product produced. Are they setting a clear separation of qualitative versus quantitative data? What sort of data are they gathering, and how do they sum it up to create something usable?
- Look for efficiency in the scouting process. What has the team done over the past few years to make the process easier and more reliable? How many people does it take to scout a single match, and why does it take that many?

There are many approaches to scouting out there, and many different systems. There are strengths and weaknesses for all of them. Having an award that celebrates scouting could help increase awareness of the need for this data amongst younger teams, and provide an incentive for older teams with established scouting programs to reach out and bring everyone up to speed.

[Citrus Dad]

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.

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... )

[Citrus Dad]

I absolutely agree with Jon's assessment and points. Getting the judges into stands might connect them with more team members.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Which of you have intentionally brought up your scouting system to judges before? Most judges afford you the opportunity to talk about anything interesting they might not have directly asked you about, so it's possible for you to inform them about the dilligence or innovations in your scouting system, and how it impacts your strategy/performance. If it impressed them enough, it could very well had tied into a "Judge's Award" or even a couple technical awards you were already being considered for (namely Quality or Creativity).

Up to this point I believe most pit crews, who talks with the judges, both don't understand scouting system well enough, including its importance, and view the scouts as being less worthy. Let's be honest--most students are in FRC to build and work on robots, not to sit in the stands and scout matches. Certainly most of our scouts would rather be on the pit crew, justifiably so. So I can't expect pit crews to extoll the scouting system over the quality of the robot build. Most often I've seen the Judges Award given to teams that have virtuous robot designs that weren't the top in the individual categories, but maybe the best overall.

[XaulZan11]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Which of you have intentionally brought up your scouting system to judges before? Most judges afford you the opportunity to talk about anything interesting they might not have directly asked you about, so it's possible for you to inform them about the dilligence or innovations in your scouting system, and how it impacts your strategy/performance. If it impressed them enough, it could very well had tied into a "Judge's Award" or even a couple technical awards you were already being considered for (namely Quality or Creativity).

This. Didn't 3138 win an award at the Championship last year for their IPA scouting system? Our scouting system (and our graciousness in sharing the system and data) was mentioned by the judges when we won the Chairman's award at Midwest this year. I believe our Chairman's presenters brought it up in the presentation or Q&A.

My concern with the "Scouting Award" is it will go to the teams that use fancy tablets or cell-phones and produce cool graphs and fancy statistics opposed to the more user-friendly, functional and practical systems. As Jon mentioned, the judges NEED to look how the team uses the data. There was one team that used video game controllers to scout, which seems to be a really innovative and award-winning system, but they team didn't create a picklist outside of 10-12 teams that stood out.

But, I guess that concern could be applied to the technical awards, too. You rarely see teams win awards for tank drives, even though they are arguably the best solution.

[Pault]

I like the concept, and I think it could have a lot of great benefits, but I am hesitant to create an award for something so specefic that not all teams do. I would not put a high enough priority on this award to bring in judges spefically devoted to it. In addition, I agree with a lot of the other points which other people in this thread have made about the problems of implementation.

But I could see a more generalized award, I.e. The strategy award. Obviously, scouting would be a huge part of this, but not everything. The way a team approaches match strategy would be taken into account, a good strategy/ versatility in strategy that you built your robot around could be recognized, or it could recognize some of the uncommon things like 1678's efforts to get all their alliance partners to be able to assist. This would make it easier for a regular judge to understand, and could recognize a lot of great things, while still pointing out and celebrating the importance of good scouting.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Pault

I like the concept, and I think it could have a lot of great benefits, but I am hesitant to create an award for something so specefic that not all teams do. I would not put a high enough priority on this award to bring in judges spefically devoted to it. In addition, I agree with a lot of the other points which other people in this thread have made about the problems of implementation.

But I could see a more generalized award, I.e. The strategy award. Obviously, scouting would be a huge part of this, but not everything. The way a team approaches match strategy would be taken into account, a good strategy/ versatility in strategy that you built your robot around could be recognized, or it could recognize some of the uncommon things like 1678's efforts to get all their alliance partners to be able to assist. This would make it easier for a regular judge to understand, and could recognize a lot of great things, while still pointing out and celebrating the importance of good scouting.

A lot of teams don't pursue "team spirit" explicitly either, but there's an award for that. I think the point is to encourage teams to try scouting. It really is part of the game, and it can broaden the appeal to more students who may be STEM oriented but not so interested in mechanical/electrical/programming (e.g., economics, finance and marketing).

I like the idea of broadening it to a "strategy" award. That may be better at encompassing the entire scope of what scouting is intended to produce. I think creating a strategy award could get the judges into the stands to see the range of scouting systems, and those systems might win a Creativity Award.

[Lil' Lavery]

Since it's been brought up a couple times now, here's the actual language for the "Team Spirit Award."

Celebrates extraordinary enthusiasm and spirit through exceptional partnership and teamwork furthering the objectives of FIRST.

It doesn't necessarily mean you're the team that cheers hardest in the stands, even if that team certainly is demonstrating their enthusiasm on the day of the competition.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Pault

I would not put a high enough priority on this award to bring in judges specifically devoted to it.

An additional thought on this--this could be an outreach path to bring in many people, particularly from business, who wouldn't otherwise consider themselves qualified to judge at a FIRST competition. They wouldn't need engineering or related technical expertise. It also could appeal to a whole range of sports fans. Look at the rising popularity of fantasy football and baseball and the March Madness pools. If that's not about scouting and strategy, then nothing is. I'm sure many of those fans would immediately recognize the parallel and be more than happy to assess the relative abilities of the teams. And now they become robotics fans--who wouldn't be captured by the excitement of the matches?

[Aaron]

It would be easy for a scouting award judge to audit the scouting reports/scouting teams organization. This would also help acknowledge the students who opt to organize and coordinate scouting efforts.