Tableau at PNW Districts

[Sunnykx]

I agree. We use qualitative data as a balance check for the Tableau data. Also, as in any data collection scheme, you need to know which variables to scout.

[Ed Law]

I agree 100%. During the build season, the scouting team meet and propose what scouting information to collect. It is then reviewed by the whole team. After it is finalized, programmers update the Android scouting app and the Tableau person prepare the graphs and work with the game strategy team to finalize the graphs.

The other nice thing about Tableau is once you have the data collected, you can look at it other ways on the fly relatively quickly if the graphs you prepared ahead of time is not as useful as you expected.

It works for us because it is a team effort. I hope more teams will try the software. It is great.

[Sean4488]

We've also begun to use Tableau this year with data from our scouting app. It's been hugely helpful not just for alliance selection, but also pre-match strategy, and convincing other of our strategical ideas.
Really helpful tool, and available to all FRC teams, it's really a shame people don't take more advantage of it.
It's really great to hear that other PNW teams are using it, I've been curious about that for a while.

[jkoritzinsky]

Quick question for you guys: One of the possible features for SuperScouter for next year is the ability to export a Tableau Data Extract file with the table generated from the schema. Would any of you find that interesting?

[alextried]

Originally Posted by jkoritzinsky

Quick question for you guys: One of the possible features for SuperScouter for next year is the ability to export a Tableau Data Extract file with the table generated from the schema. Would any of you find that interesting?

Yes please! What we're planning on doing right now is SuperScouter -> Excel -> Tableau.

[adammiller3122]

Originally Posted by jkoritzinsky

Quick question for you guys: One of the possible features for SuperScouter for next year is the ability to export a Tableau Data Extract file with the table generated from the schema. Would any of you find that interesting?

I would love to see how that would work out! I love the idea!

[Sunnykx]

Originally Posted by Sean4488

We've also begun to use Tableau this year with data from our scouting app. It's been hugely helpful not just for alliance selection, but also pre-match strategy, and convincing other of our strategical ideas.
Really helpful tool, and available to all FRC teams, it's really a shame people don't take more advantage of it.
It's really great to hear that other PNW teams are using it, I've been curious about that for a while.

I'm really excited that Shockwave is using Tableau! We're pretty sure we've qualified for PNW District Champs so we'll see you there. I'd love for our Tableau student analyst to meet with yours and talk about Tableau.

[Sean4488]

Originally Posted by Sunnykx

I'm really excited that Shockwave is using Tableau! We're pretty sure we've qualified for PNW District Champs so we'll see you there. I'd love for our Tableau student analyst to meet with yours and talk about Tableau.

Absolutely, I'd love to meet your analyst, we have a few people using it, but primarily me, so I'd be excited to meet others. See you guys at Dist. Champs!

[Sunnykx]

Originally Posted by Sean4488

Absolutely, I'd love to meet your analyst, we have a few people using it, but primarily me, so I'd be excited to meet others. See you guys at Dist. Champs!

Awesome!

[Alex Webber]

Is there a product key in the KOP? I might ask my leas mentor about downloading it on our Monday meeting right before the IA regional.

I've heard it's super awesome, and with our awesome scouting system, a printer in the pit, and this, that could round off our data. Not to mention look pretty.

[Sunnykx]

Originally Posted by Alex Webber

Is there a product key in the KOP? I might ask my leas mentor about downloading it on our Monday meeting right before the IA regional.

I've heard it's super awesome, and with our awesome scouting system, a printer in the pit, and this, that could round off our data. Not to mention look pretty.

All students can get a free one year license at the Tableau site by offering proof of being a high school student. Many students upload a picture of a recent report card. There are also 5 free keys for Tableau licenses on TIMS for non-students. It's in their list of freebies. You would need your TIMS administrator to login and give you the key. We use about 3 of the keys for mentors.

You will need some time to get used to Tableau - do the tutorials, perhaps practice with uploading some data - to make Tableau useful. Unfortunately, it does have a learning curve and I wouldn't recommend deciding to use it the week before a competition with no practice or experience.

[Dancin103]

Originally Posted by Sunnykx

You will need some time to get used to Tableau - do the tutorials, perhaps practice with uploading some data - to make Tableau useful. Unfortunately, it does have a learning curve and I wouldn't recommend deciding to use it the week before a competition with no practice or experience.

I fully agree with this. I have been using Tableau for a while now and I absolutely LOVE it! We are using it for scouting, data is input into an excel sheet via 6 tablets. Tableau is one amazing tool and the fact that we get 5 FREE seats is so awesome.

If you are an absolute wiz in Excel, ie can write VBA, functions that are miles long, etc with your eyes closed, you will be able to pick up Tableau in a good couple of hours. But I'd definitely not try using it for the first time a week before your competition, but I would encourage you to take your first competition scouting data and playing with it in Tableau to learn its capabilities.

Peace
CBJ

[Sean4488]

You will need some time to get used to Tableau - do the tutorials, perhaps practice with uploading some data - to make Tableau useful. Unfortunately, it does have a learning curve and I wouldn't recommend deciding to use it the week before a competition with no practice or experience.[/quote]



Yeah, to put this into context, I spent the majority of build season on learning Tableau and I still don't know how to do lots of things.

[*Rachelle*]

We've considered using Tableau as well, it's actually on my laptop, I just haven't dedicated the time to learning it proficiently enough for competition use.

Not to mention we do not have enough students to have one specifically set on data input, I did it for two years and found that we could analyze the handwritten sheets much more effectively. It is mostly a tally system with a section for driver skill, so while we may not have the graphs, it is still quantitative.

My first question would be how long do your scouting night meetings generally take with the help of Tableau? Oftentimes when teams are talking about how they scout most efficiently I can't tell if efficient to them is 1, 3, or even 6 hours of hashing out the data.

Our current system in the last two years has been great for us, I'd be interested in seeing what your match scouting sheets look like as well. Would you mind sharing?

Congratulations on the win in Glacier Peak, those finals matches were fun to watch!

[Sunnykx]

Glacier Peak Excel Data Main (1) Final.xlsx

Originally Posted by *Rachelle*

We've considered using Tableau as well, it's actually on my laptop, I just haven't dedicated the time to learning it proficiently enough for competition use.

Not to mention we do not have enough students to have one specifically set on data input, I did it for two years and found that we could analyze the handwritten sheets much more effectively. It is mostly a tally system with a section for driver skill, so while we may not have the graphs, it is still quantitative.

My first question would be how long do your scouting night meetings generally take with the help of Tableau? Oftentimes when teams are talking about how they scout most efficiently I can't tell if efficient to them is 1, 3, or even 6 hours of hashing out the data.

Our current system in the last two years has been great for us, I'd be interested in seeing what your match scouting sheets look like as well. Would you mind sharing?

Congratulations on the win in Glacier Peak, those finals matches were fun to watch!

Hi Rachelle,

First of all, I'd like to say that we loved your team at Auburn. We were really bummed when we couldn't pick you, but even if you hadn't become a captain, you probably would have been snapped up well before it came to be our turn again. You were so fast, reliable, and a great defender. Good luck at your next competition!

I uploaded our Scouting Form and our Excel data from Glacier Peak. On the scouting form, the shooting location is on the left, the breaching,shooting, and end game information is in the middle, and the data entry column is on the right. Scouts fill in the middle and left sections, then rewrite their answers on the right, hopefully legibly, for ease of data entry.

The Excel data form includes all of our quantitative data from Glacier Peak. It does not include the qualitative data, which is handwritten. As always, I caution against using quantitative data only. It includes the majority of our information but doesn't completely account for driver skill, smart play, and other important variables. The qualitative data on your team bumped you up considerably on our lists - much more so than if we had just looked at quantitative data. Our analyst, Alli, is planning to fill all of the Excel boxes up with zero next time and our scouts will change the values when there is something to enter. You can upload our data into your own Tableau file to play around with it.

I would be happy to send you our Tableau packaged workbook from Glacier Peak so you can see what it looks like. I wasn't able to upload it here because it is the wrong file type. I could email it to you or your team if you'd like. It's a read-only, but you can make your own based on it.

You mentioned you do a handwritten tally/driver skill sort of data collection. This is what I use for qualitative information. I don't worry too much about getting all of the data - I do a rough approximation since we have quantitative data covered - but I write enough to remind myself of the robot capabilities. I focus on adding many one word comments such as "struggled, died, fast, smart, wandered, hit partner," etc. I think a handwritten approach like you discussed is a nice option for teams with limited scouting resources. You may miss some things, but you get the gist of it.

In terms of our scouting meetings/preliminary alliance selections after the first day of scouting: it takes us about two to three hours. While we could probably do it faster, my goal is to get my analyst team (4 veterans and 2 first-timers) to understand and think about the robots. Alliance selections is a much tougher task in my mind than match strategy. We make our lists first - top 24 of auto, shooting, breaching (static and manipulative defenses), challenge, scaling, defensive - and then go through each list, raising and lowering teams based on qualitative data. This takes the most time. Then we talk about who we would pick, who we would decline, who we want to lobby, and who is on our do not pick list. We also do mock drafts at that time, looking at likely seeding. We end the night by determining lobbying strategies and noting which robots we want to learn more about the next day. The next morning, we send our lobbying team out, we watch more robots and finalize their position, and make our final lists.

This is probably more information than you wanted but I am hoping others might find it helpful, too. Each team needs to do what works best for them and we are always looking to improve.

Good luck to you!

[ATTACH]Glacier Peak Excel Data Main (1) Final.xlsx[/ATTACH]