Make Scouting Fun?

[wazateer1]

Originally Posted by Billfred

One of the items brought up in one of Karthik's webinars: gambling.

Print up some play money and start taking bets amongst the scouts for various things in the upcoming match. (These should be simple win/lose propositions: Does red get 3 robots on the batter? Over/under on blue scoring 20.5 points in auto?) The scouts paying attention will be able to make more educated wagers, and thus reap whatever rewards you dangle out there.

This is something that 3506 has done with our online wagering system. While we don't have scouts bet against each other, but betting against the system, I can still advocate personally that people use it very often. It's a great incentive even for people who aren't scheduled to be scouting at the moment to pay attention to the matches and which robots are likely to win or do well.

Our teams scouting works such that everyone takes turns gathering quantitative data (plus a few comments per match) and then volunteers who feel they have gathered enough qualitative data from the stands + the drive team and coach meet on Saturday night and pool our data (we do have a watch list, in case of any drastic improvements on Sunday). Ever since we implemented this system, I have noticed many more people volunteering for these meetings or at least pulling aside people known to always attend the scouting meetings and giving them their opinion about a specific team.

While paper systems have an appeal in their reliability (I couldn't count the amount of times our wagering system was brought down, and people almost rioted, on my two hands ), we have found that a well implemented, easy to use and visually appealing dual scouting/wagering system has done wonders for involvement in scouting, and interest in volunteering for scouting meetings.

Sorry if this is pushing the whole paper/electronic debate (read: simmering embers ready to ignite at any time in every Chief Delphi reader who has heard of the issue), but a electronic system seems to also inspire longer comments. When you can write as much as you want, without any limitation on length, people seem to use it. Another plus is we can actually READ all of the data, unlike if the comments where written by hand. Also, we require names at the beginning of every submission and thus have a very easy way to check exactly who submitted what, and it is much easier to hold people responsible.
(This year we have had to call out a person who, in their comments, said they "were distracted during autonomous", so they just " guessed" that 900 went under the low bar that match)

I can't garuntee this will work at any given commit, but here is the repository our programmers keep the code for their scouting system in (warning, it's angular, php, and MySQL, so if you want to run it in on your local machine you need a *amp stack)
https://github.com/Yeti-Robotics/angular-scouting