Advice for a hapless rookie?

[Tim Delles]

OKay so you are going to SVR.

If you are really that worried about not havig anything prepared for the competition I would suggest talking to some veteran teams about what they do to pre-scout. You have a lot of teams that are veteran teams going, and I am pretty sure that team 254, The Cheesepoofs would be glad to help you in any way they could.

One more helpful hint for you is did you watch any matches from last week. If not it may be helpful for you to watch it so that you can understand how the game has unfolded to this point. You can catch all of the NASA/VCU Regional Matches here

Also if you do go their with nothing it is not that big of a problem. You will thursday(Practice) to see how things are begining to unfold for your regional. This will give you some time to see what teams are working toward being able to do both in and out of autonomous mode.

Good luck

[EricH]

Two tips:
1) When you do pit scouting, act like you believe everything the other teams tell you, and take pictures. The other teams may be exaggerating, but you'll find that out when you do match scouting.

2) When you do match scouting, you need a minimum of six people. It is impossible for one person to do three robots, and two is very hard. Use something simple, like a printout of an Excel spreadsheet with a simple data system, and keep it as objective as possible.

[DjAlamose]

Originally Posted by EricH

Two tips:
1) When you do pit scouting, act like you believe everything the other teams tell you, and take pictures. The other teams may be exaggerating, but you'll find that out when you do match scouting.

2) When you do match scouting, you need a minimum of six people. It is impossible for one person to do three robots, and two is very hard. Use something simple, like a printout of an Excel spreadsheet with a simple data system, and keep it as objective as possible.

Not alot of teams (like ours) have the resources to have 6 people do match scouting. That is why we have come up with a solution that utilizes 4 people:

You split the students up into two groups. Each group has a computer with the database and software loaded and ready to go. Then each of the m watches an entire alliance. They take notes about robots and what they do. Then after the matches are over, they collaborate and enter the data into the computer.

It would be great to have 6 people watching the matches but then it can become hectic to organize all of the papers unless you have a way for each person to enter the data separately. Data organization is the hard part, especially when you have limited resources. These days laptops are commonplace and you don’t need anything fancy for what we are doing here. You must also look at what is the most important information to gather. If you are trying to gather too much information then you won’t get the same results. You want to limit the amount of data for the resources you have. Do not try and get too much data, it will just cause too many problems.

If you can, partner up with another team to do your scouting. It is a great way to show your willingness to help other teams as well as get to know new people. Plus the data will be less biased because you will have multiple points of view. There are plenty of ways to get things done it’s just a matter of deciding what you need and how to get it done.

[EricH]

We don't have enough people on the team to do it either. We enlist parents and family and mentors that aren't in the pits to help.