Make Scouting Fun?

[stens987]

Originally Posted by choltz

As a relatively new member to scouting on a 40ish member team, I'm wondering how other teams make scouting less of a bore for the students involved, specifically: how do you keep scouts focused and recording accurate data?

We have tried different things like having breaks to play sports outside and to get food; even a two-shift system with only half the scouts working at one time. We still get sheets with doodles over blanks and clearly incorrect data and I'm wondering if anyone has found a way to reduce this.

We have a 30+member team, and I think our scouts all truly enjoy scouting. We haven't really done much (directly) to develop this aspect of the team culture, but the entire team does acknowledge the importance of having good information for the end goal of winning matches and having a winning alliance.

This year, we tried reformatting our scouting meeting, which gave more students a voice, and we got very positive feedback. We broke the 'yes' list into 4 groups of 6. Scouting sub-groups split off to analyze and rank the six teams. They also recorded their arguments for ranking the six teams in that order. Once they were ranked, we brought the groups back together to put them into a larger sort (and we still had their initial arguments on hand). It generated a lot of meaningful discussion, and we ended up with great third bots! We are all very proud of our scouts!!!

Good luck and have a great season