Computer-Assisted Scouting

[Graham Donaldson]

Originally Posted by ewankoff

our school district issued every student their own laptop. in the past years we have tried to develop programs that each scout could use their own laptop to update a scouting database. unfortunatly we had problems integrating these programs with our team ad the network and they did not work. last year we combined paper scouting with a computer database. scouts would fill out of sheet of 4 matches where they scouted the same spot 4 times. then the sheets were run up to a person inputing it into the excel spread sheet. this method helped us get into the finals in palmetto last year.

Yeah... and it was me and joe putting all that in! That was terrible! Don't recommend doing that again.

As a alternative, we created an access database, you can check it out:

That's what I'm planning to do this year with scouting. I'm going to be running a Microsoft Access class during our training sessions (I learned it over the summer), and we hope to build a database with forms and everything and then hook it up to our wireless server (no internet, just server-based forums and such we set up for each regional) so that with our laptops (which have wireless built in), have round scouters fill out the forms, send them to the database, and have a live update. Someone will be up top overseeing everything, and sending reports down to the pits either by a forum post or by a printer sheet, or a telephone call. Hopefully, I'll be able to post the database on Delphi once it's finished. But we'll have to see what happens.

The Canuck