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  #16   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 14-04-2016, 12:16
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Grant Cox Grant Cox is offline
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Re: Make Scouting Fun?

I love this question, instead of just another "what system do you use" thread. The approach that we've taken on 148 to answer this question follows two major tenets.

Make scouting (and strategy, and picking) a priority not just for scouts, but for the team as a whole.

If you establish a culture where everyone on the team understands the importance of scout data, then scouts themselves are more inclined to take ownership and develop a passion for their work. Some examples...
  • During the off-season, much like mechanical subteams practice drivetrain CAD and such, we brainstorm and test new scouting systems (tablets? paper? laptops? scantrons?).
  • When discussing robot strategy immediately after kickoff, "what does a winning alliance look like" comes up before "what does a winning robot look like".
  • During events, Friday night data (top scorers, top autons, etc) are shared with the entire team so they can get a feel for what it is that we've been doing all day in the stands.
  • Exceptional picks, "dark horse" 3rd partners, etc are celebrated with a prominence similar to an outstanding driver performance.

An unfortunately common sentiment on some teams is that students "assigned" to scouting are the "leftovers" after you've already determined drive team, pit crew, etc. I'm proud to say that on 148, as a result of the above, it's almost the opposite - we have some students who sign up for scouting/strategy before applying for anything else.


Take the mindlessness out of mindless data collection - make it your own.

We try to inject playfulness into otherwise monotonous data collection wherever possible. Many teams come up with their own vernacular to describe game elements - we own it. For example, in 2015 there was no field on our sheets for "Recycling Containers taken from the Step in Autonomous". We referred to that power move as "robbing the bank", and thus the scouting sheet had "# of banks robbed", the pick list had "best bank robbers", etc.

Students also decorate their own clipboards, are encouraged to put some personality into qualitative comments, etc.

Someone earlier in the thread mentioned Karthik's betting suggestion - we love this too, and have a few "betting games" that the scouts sometimes play in the stands. Not only does it gamify match scouting, it also incentivizes students to know more about every robot on the field. It's easy to bet on an alliance made up of three powerhouse teams, but it takes a good scout to guess how a match between two "average" alliances will play out.
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Unread 14-04-2016, 12:19
TungstenPony TungstenPony is offline
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Re: Make Scouting Fun?

Quote:
Originally Posted by nickyflash View Post
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.
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Unread 14-04-2016, 12:50
GreyingJay GreyingJay is offline
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Re: Make Scouting Fun?

Lots of great suggestions here. I echo the number one principle is:

Ensure the team realizes how important scouting is.

But this statement is predicated on:

Scouting IS important to my team.

So the first step is making sure that scouting data IS valued by your team. Is it just used for pick lists or do you use the data for every match? What happens to the raw data being compiled by the scouts? When does the drive team review it? Does feedback get acted upon? Is scouting seen as the "well there's nothing else left" position or is it valued, even revered?

This year's game offers some excellent opportunities for scouts to see their data get used and have a real impact in influencing the match score. It is easy to build a profile of what defenses each robot can and can't cross. This is crucial data to give to the drive team in advance so they can set up the alliance defenses.

Even if your team isn't expecting to perform well and end up in a picking position, having good scouting can still help. If you know your capabilities will mesh well with one of the picking teams, you can go sell yourself to them. If you can back up your offer to work with them with solid scouting data (that should match their own) then you'll have an even easier sell.
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Last edited by GreyingJay : 14-04-2016 at 12:52.
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