Lack of passion in scouting

[Rich Ross]

Just to give heart to the scouts out there. You scouts WILL be the difference on your team. When you scout matches and that data is successfully complied, it helps you pick well, or if you arent ranked it helps you see what the better teams are doing.

My Scouts did a really nice job and i hope yours will too. Don't look at scouting as a chore, because its not. I scouted a bunch, and i enjoyed every minute of it.

[Lisa Perez]

If you have the amount of people, but there seems to be a lack of interest, make shifts within a designated scouting group, so that those scouts know that they have a job to get done, but are also given the chance to take a break from sitting that long. You'll get a lot more response from someone whose shift is 1 hour as opposed to 6 hours.

As applies for any other subteam, it helps a lot to have one or two students completely enthusiastic and willing to lead the scouting group to begin with, because the scouts will look up to their peers (as opposed to what they will do if they are just told to record information).

Ask your scouts to pretend they are creating strategy for a sporting event. Chances are, they'll have a better idea of what needs to be recorded. I know that when I was new to my team in high school, I had no idea what scouting was. If I had been able to make a parallel between robotics and sports, I would have been MUCH better as a scout.

It might even help to point out where scouting helped your driveteam make decisions in matches: "Hey, we played defense on that robot there because that's where they typically score from, and look how well our alliance did", etc. etc. It'll show those scouts that their work really did pay off, and will help them to be proud of their work.

[cziggy343]

Originally Posted by Rich Ross

Just to give heart to the scouts out there. You scouts WILL be the difference on your team. When you scout matches and that data is successfully complied, it helps you pick well, or if you arent ranked it helps you see what the better teams are doing.

My Scouts did a really nice job and i hope yours will too. Don't look at scouting as a chore, because its not. I scouted a bunch, and i enjoyed every minute of it.

i no that scouting is important on our team. being the main student scouter, i got to be the representative . and i got to speak into a microphone and say a big word like "graciously"

[Kims Robot]

Another thought is to find a way to make scouting more fun...

We do both Pit & Match scouting (although echoing others here, match scouting gets more weight than pit... anyone can say they can score 20 tubes in a match, to see them do it is another).

Our pit scouting was developed by one of our mentors who knows labview really well, and he created this really awesome GUI with the help of our strategy/drive team. In a way, it makes scouting fun They have a visual way to add tubes to the rack, they can type in notes on teams, and indicate extra points, penalties etc, all through a computer interface. In the end, they hit submit, and we can pull from a master database all the information about exactly what the team did during the match. (look for this to be released for other teams to use soon - almost done working out kinks).

Pit scouting is a good way for students to see other teams, perhaps they dont know everything about every robot in existance, but I have to echo Ben's thoughts here... help them LEARN. This is not about being the best at everything you do, its about learning. Maybe they dont seem to care because they dont understand, or maybe their passion is animation and they are just trying to help out the team. Who knows... take a minute, and educate instead of getting frustrated.

[Taylor]

A couple thoughts -
1. Remember that as a scout, you are a representative of your team. If a scout comes to my pit and asks how high our ramps go (it's quite obvious we have no intention of having any ramps), I may (mistakenly) assume the rest of that scout's team is as naive as him or her. Serve your team well. Think things through.
2. As a scout, if you see a feature on another team that would work well with your strategy (or vice versa), tell them! Plant the seeds of possible alliances as much as possible.
3. Scout in pairs. That way you have a friend to talk to, someone who may pick up things you may miss, another pair of eyes and ears. If you're very strong on game knowledge, pair yourself up with a weaker teammate. If you don't know very much about the game, grab a knowledgeable partner. You both will benefit from the shared knowledge, as well as any strategies other teams may use.
4. Concentrate on specific robots. If each scout is very smart on 5 or 10 robots, and can explain those 5 or 10 robots very well, it would serve the team better than one scout who knows a little about all robots. This also works well for match scouts - if they only have to concentrate on a couple robots then watching matches become less tedious.
I hope you found these helpful, and I hope 1529's scouts serve as great ambassadors for our team at Purdue.

[cire]

Some kid at GLR came to scout our team and he asked me if i could "fill out this sheet" for him. I told him he's gona have to at least ask me the questions himself, or I wont fill it out at all.

Another thing that bugged me related to scouting is that the students on my team constantly pointed all of the scouts to me, even ones that were at almost every single build meeting. This disappointed me. I know they knew the answers, but maybe they werent sure on exact details or didnt want to be sociable.

Hopefully it wont be a problem at the championships!