Reflections on Scouting 07

[Cyberguy34000]

Our pictures weren't that great either. Most of them were just the backs of people standing in the pit. We got a handful of successful pictures.

A cool trick I found out is if you go up to one of the drivers or someone in the way of your picture and then ask "Would you mind if I took a picture of your robot?", they'll usually give you a funny look and say sure, but it's a polite way of getting everyone clear of the camera shot. We had more issues with just plain forgetting to take photos of teams than on having to retake shots.

When we went to Cleveland in 2005, we came up with good scouting information, but it was murder to those who were copying the info from individual sheets to the master sheet for each team. Filing through pain-in-the-neck accordion folders to find the team.

Hehe, we had the accordion folders at nationals that year too... Evil, evil accordion folders. And about 12 scout books to coordinate into the Master Book, all the handwriting was of various degrees of legibility of course. Crap, those were a pain! How did I ever live without the computer?

Thanks for telling us about Boilermaker! Any other scouts care to ship in their $0.02 about how their scouting went this year?

[Dan Petrovic]

Originally Posted by Cyberguy34000

Hehe, we had the accordion folders at nationals that year too... Evil, evil accordion folders. And about 12 scout books to coordinate into the Master Book, all the handwriting was of various degrees of legibility of course. Crap, those were a pain! How did I ever live without the computer?

Thanks for telling us about Boilermaker! Any other scouts care to ship in their $0.02 about how their scouting went this year?

We don't have much handwriting to deal with. The scouts are either circling Y, N, 4", 12", or they are tallying. The only writing we have to deal with is their initials and a column I forgot to mention

It's basically the defended column. A scout would circle Y or N to indicate whether or not they were defended, then they would list the teams that were defending the team they were assigned to scout. That way we know what's going on if a team scores 6 tubes in one match and only 1 or 2 in the next.

[danshaffer]

We ran pretty intense scouting operations at both of our regionals this year. Thursday we took a more relaxed approach, sending one or two people around to fill out our pit scouting form. (We forgot the form in vegas, so we had to make up the questions. Luckily we had a notebook.) Thursday night we inputted the info in our database with pics. The database was a java app from team 768, modified by our programming team. We added some algorithms for offense and defense, as well as some averages.
Friday we had six people in the stands with clipboards and a sheet of paper for every robot in every match. Participants were forced to work this, with the understanding that they were missing school, so ought to be useful. We took relatively detailed notes on autonomous, focus, ringers on each level, ramps, spoilers, and then we asked for an A-F grade and general comments. Friday night we put all of this data into our modified java app, then sorted teams based on number of ringers per match and ramp deployment percentage. This gave us a list of the top scorers, including that we were #12 at LVR.
This info allowed us to generate a very nice scouting report after being selected. We called three of the four quarterfinals correctly, and said that the other (ours) was too close to call. Turns out we beat the #4 in two matches, and 8 managed to beat 1 in one match, while we called 1 over 8 by more than 100 points.
It was a pain to get, enter and analyze all of this data, but it gave us a much better look at the field than FIRST's rankings. Pity we didn't get to use it.

[Cyberguy34000]

danshaffer, match scouting is indeed pretty incredible when you've got enough manpower to do it, and it helps incredibly in picking partners. How many people do you think ended up doing scouting work?

I saw your sheets and it looked amazing. I espesially like the 15 bot handout you made for selection. My scout team was in awe of your product. Congrats on your award and we'll see you next year in CO.

Thank you for your kind words, unfortunately this is my last year with the team, but I know that Mark will do a good job with scouting next year.

-Chris

[115inventorsam]

Scouting was quite an experience for me this year, that's for sure. MVRT had a team of 6 students(including me) scouting each match, 1 per team on the field, with a leader supervising them. The leader did a great job making the scouting sheet, and was pretty reliable when they were needed to provide info for the team.

A problem I thought I was going to have was having to concentrate on one team, and I thought that would possibly not allow me to enjoy the matches, turns out I was wrong, dead wrong. Even when I was busy scouting matches, I still had the time to see the big picture of a match.

But the big surprise for the scouting team came on Friday at the Davis Sacramento Regional. We actually won the Kleiner, Perkins, Caufields & Byers Entreprenuership Award partly because of how organized and hard-working we were in scouting. Of course there were plenty of other reasons for winning the award, but this one really stood out to us.

Scouting to us also meant having a meeting at the hotel that lasted til nearly midnight, trying to decide what course of action to take when it came to alliance selections. So overall, scouting kept me really busy, but it sure didn't stop me from having a great time at the regionals.

[LightWaves1636]

Scouting at the Colorado Regional was defiantly the best this year. Although Alliance pickings seemed a bit rushed after the last preliminary match was done. Good thing the team scouts were constantly on the move to seek out the perfect alliance. I defiantly like the Team Scouting Area FIRST created, that was very neat.

[vivek16]

our team had four students that came to the regionals and 3 mentors so the mentors were taking care of talking to people/scouts that came to our pits ; getting lunch ; taking care of where everyone was; helping with fixing the robot by telling us what might be a good idea (not actually touching the robot since our team has a strict student building only rule thing/mentor mentality) to fix a problem that might arise.


1 or 2 of the kids would stay behind for pit work and repair/tightening bolts and the like.

the rest would scout the competetion or strategize the next match with some members from other teams in our alliance.

[Fritztopher]

Our team had four pages of scouting sheets, only one of which turned out to be useful. The two pages of pit scouting didn't yield any more information than a photograph did. The page of match scouting from Thursday also turned out to be useless, as some teams didn't show up to their matches and other teams changed their robots dramatically between Thursday and Friday. The only useful information we collected turned out to be the number of tubes scored by a team each match and whether it lifted other robots or was lifted.

[Scion13]

When did FIRST set up a scouting station?
I never noticed on in Trenton or Chesapeake. That would have made my job alot easier.

[JB987]

Team 987 set up a 3 table scouting station with power at top of lower arena stands for any team interested in setting up a video camera and with blessing of the LVR Planning Committee...it worked out great, especially since the location put cameras above headtops. I wish all regionals would do the same...

[Chinaman07]

Scouting this year was definitely intresting.

Boston:
In Boston, after taking down all the pit scouting information, they didn't really need the information so that made my efforts ( however neat and organizied they were ) useless. In match scouting I gave my team sheets to fill out for each robot. With high hopes that this would go better than my pit scouting efforts, I came back an hour later to review their progress, and what do you know? I found a bunch of half-baked efforts and some people refused to do it at all. In the heat of the moment I ripped up 1/2 the match scouting sheets to show how mad I was. Eventually it worked out, because we got our first pick 121 and our other pick (1568 i think?) turned out to be a good alliance, but not enough to take down the "NU-hyper-force" alliance.

Palmetto:
Because of my previous expierence in Boston I took a different approach to this, instead of taking pit scouting like i normally do; I took pics of every robot and their drivetrain. Also I spent my whole day next to the field taking match scouting. Because the practice matches were also pretty intense and the same with the qualifying matches, I got a lot of info on every robot. That friday night we made a list of teams that we wanted to be alliance partners with and what do you know? Everything turned out how we wanted to because we got to ally with 1251 and our second pick 1758 I was equally happy with as our second pick. Sadly our alliance wasn't enough to take those beastly ramps of 1319 and their consecutive 60 bonus points with 342 and 832.

[falconmaster]

Team 842 here

We have a great new device that makes scouting fun and allows quick data analysis!

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/27654?

Check it out!!!

[Zyik]

As for scouting personnel you really need a set team with passionate members. Also, it really helps if the team your scouting has a set person in the pits for scouts to talk to. It's difficult to just stand there and have no one know any of the answers. 973 had a set person there for scouts to ask questions to. Many of the teams I scouted didn't. And don't go saying you need a big team to do this, 973 has 11 people.

For software we use an access database. Also paper scouting sheets.

Anyone know a good small printer btw?