Lack of passion in scouting

[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.