Make Scouting Fun?

[TungstenPony]

Originally Posted by nickyflash

This explains our situation, but for us it wasn't that people had nothing better to do than scout, but that they couldn't do anything but scout.

I'm quite interested in hearing a response from a smaller team and how they manage to make scouting entertaining. For our small team, we have a scarcity of people; consequently, people are divided into the pit crew and the stands crew with almost no breaks. In the stands, six people are necessary at all times and unfortunately we don't have enough people for a full 2-set rotation.

We're still using a paper scouting system.

This year, my team (4028) has a total of 20 students. The students are from a small school, thus our small size. We have 3 students on drive team, 4 students for pit crew, 3 students on pit scouting, leaving 10 students for stands scouting; and that is only if all of the students are able to attend the competitions. We have struggled in the past with giving the scouters in the stands enough breaks to just decompress instead of filling in match sheets all day.

One way we were able to alleviate this is have a group of parent scouters. A week before the competitions we attend, the students put together a training session for the parents on how to scout the matches. Most of the parents who volunteer are more than willing to help (since they are just sitting in the stands anyway for most of the day). The challenge is that only a few of them truly understand the game. That's where our student scouters come to the rescue. Last year, they created an awesome training session for the parents that went over the basics of the game and gave them the tools they would need to be a good scout. It was great to see the students get involved. I found that it really helped them make sure they knew what was going on during the matches and gave the students more pride/value in scouting because they were viewed as the "experts." If the parents had a question about how to record some data, they knew to go to a student, not a mentor (like me) which was awesome to see. The parents would also ask a lot of questions that the students had not thought of before. This made the students realize that some of their scouting methods were difficult to understand, thus sparking them to streamline the scouting process.

Our parent scouters typically do not participate in our pick list strategy meeting. We have lead stand scouting students that are responsible for knowing the "field", which means talking with all of their stand scouters (including parents) about any robots of interest that they have seen.

In the end, I would love to have enough students on the team to have plenty of scouters to rotate in and out. However, with our small 20 student team, that just isn't possible right now. When we thought about getting the parents involved, we saw this as an opportunity to engage the student scouters and give them ownership in what they were doing for the team at competitions. It worked out well for us last year and we have continued to use it this year. Now that we are heading to Worlds, several students on the scouting team have really taken to heart the importance of scouting and have developed a good process for engaging other student scouters who are less interested; all on their own!

Its things like this that make me happy to be a mentor. I just provide the tools and support, and the students take off and create something amazing.