Best Ways to Scout

[XaulZan11]

Originally Posted by Boltman

Best way to scout is "eyes on bots", excel sheets , pen and paper note taking. I use a cheap thin spiral binder and highlighters . My awesome scouts also take copious notes. I started the scouting department from scratch last year. Scouting is equal to engineering and drive team IMO and the entire team agrees with me they love it. Not only for winning games but building alliances to have the best chance at a win.

A field of 60 with 10-12 games is not indicative of a high level of need for data analysis and is highly susceptible to schedule pairings more than raw data from stats. Eyes first, notes second and data on first night to see if there are any you missed. Usually not the case...might be one or two but then you watch on day 2 and go "hmm wonder how they got that stat?" eyes don't lie like stats do.

I don't get alliance captains that don't already know their second picks instantly of a pick list, other than they must not scout at all and ultimately they exit in QF.

I could agree with the "eyes over stats" idea IF you have experienced scouts* that know what to look for and IF you have enough experienced scouts to get eyes on a majority of matches for every team. You realistically need at least four experienced scouts to literally watch 90% of matches. Since most FIRST teams do not have these resources, putting together a stats-based system (where any freshman can contribute) is best for most teams.

* By experienced scout, I mean a scout that can remember basic information about nearly all teams and put teams in tiers or rough picklist. In the roughly 10 years I've scouted, there are probably 3-5 students who I'd consider capable of doing this for an entire 60+ team event.

[CBG]

My team uses an electronic reporting form, but we use phones and tablets that connect directly to the internet. We also value paper scouting. One of our mentors always takes paper notes on each robot's performance across one or two matches and we rearrange these cards when making our pick list Friday night. I also want to point out the advantages of making a pick list of Friday--it may seem smart not to make these kinds of decisions until just before alliance selections, but you will be pressed for time at this point and it's best to have an idea of the order of teams that you can rearrange when teams either increase or decrease their level of performance.

[trumpthero786]

STORM Robotics also has created an Android application! We are particularly proud of this!

More info and the link to the Play Store is in this following thread.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=142649

It is easy to use, very thorough, and completely offline, utilizing QR codes and outputting .csv files which can be opened in excel for easy management and analysis. There is a User app for data entry, and then a Master app for collection and creation of the CSV files. I hope you try it out! We, along with several other teams, have had great success using the app at our respective competitions.

[Roboshant]

You can always use google sheets offline on devices. Simply set up an excel form on google sheets, and people can edit the excel on their device. To compile simply connect the phones to a computer (android only) or go outside at the end of the day and send it with 4g. I have some google sheets forms handy if you want them.