How did your scouting work?

[Cyberguy34000]

Scouting for our team was fairly last minute. To be honest, in the past we really haven't needed scouting because we usually either

a.) Make high seed and can pick whoever we want

b.) Are picked for finals because we've got a cool bot.

But this year, with the increased strategy and whatnot, we did put a scouting effort together, but it was fairly last minute. Both for regionals and nationals. So it ended up being 2-3 people doing all of the scouting.

At both regionals and nationals the philosophy going into scouting was that this was going to be only the most relevant information that the drive team could use on moments notice.

Don't know what other teams usually do with the info when it's compiled. For us, the drive team didn't really want scouting to hand a binder to them and look through all of it, but preferred that they have a scouting member on hand to give out information when they needed it in planning.

At regionals it was hastily written hand scribbled notes that were turned into a double sided sheet with sections for each team with Good: (transmission, low CG, crab drive, speed, traction, etc.) Bad: (KB wheels, Tipping, etc) and Strat: (goes for home row in first min.). Needless to say, transcribing took a good 4 hours or so, was a serious headache, and while it was useful, it could have been more organized. Picking alliance partners in finals was difficult because we got low seed, and it was hard to see, out of who was left, the overall quality of the bots remaining. We picked good alliance partners, but it could have been made a lot easier.

So at nationals we went the other way, 6 printed sheets (could have done 3 double-sided) with fill in the blank info. Pre-nat scouting got us the team # and names, and we would have had pictures if I hadn't counted on a free computer/printer at the hotel (doh). See thread. At least a few other teams found it useful.

The scouting sheet actually worked quite well, and information was quickly at hand whenever it was needed, the rate-it opinion bubbles worked very well, though it would have been useful to coordinate our scales beforehand

In hindsight the sheet worked pretty well but some things could have been eliminated and wouldn't have been missed. Knowing whether or not teams had treads or KB wheels didn't help a whole lot, and traction was very very difficult to actually gage. So that ended up being useless. Instead of a check list for Auto code, it should have been a fill-in line with each line being a different program. Auto code was very difficult to read. Should have added a strategy section along with good and bad, and replaced traction gage with CG because most bots ended up with medium center of gravity, of which many were on the high or low side.

Overall it turned out pretty good. And it gives us a lot of things to look out for next year. Preparing for next year, our scouting will probably be slimmed out even more, but for a first year effort, it turned out OK.

Now to plan for next season...