Oh, boy, scouting will be difficult this year!

[smurfgirl]

I think scouting will be difficult, but manageable.

A suggestion is to begin by taking pictures of all the robots on Thursday, and filing them ahead of time so you can remember a robot when you look at its file. Then, perhaps use a system with 6 scouters, 1 per team on the field. Have them keep track of key elements:

- how they pick up
- how they score
- which pieces they score
- how accurately they score them
- how many they score
- their driving ability
- their defensive capabilities
- any penalties they incurred
- their weaknesses
- how easily they can be scored on
- where their PS is positioned
- what their PS does during the match
- what they do in autonomous
- if/how they interact with other robots
- do they get stuck in robot pile-ups?
- do they break down easily?
- etc, I'm sure there are other useful things that I forgot to add

While this sounds like a long list, it's actually relatively easy to get all this data. Before the match starts, check on PS positioning, and then just watch the robot and write for the duration of the match. Perhaps something like:

"PS in home fueling station, auton. drives straight to other side of field, gets moonrocks from PS, shoots into other robots, ~50% accuracy, scored about 8 moonrocks on other alliance, lost control of robot and tipped about 1:20 into match- very vulnerable when hit sideways"

You can scrawl something like that out over the course of the match, and since you'll have data like this for every match, you can get a pretty clear picture of how the robot performs, and its trends for the day, rather than looking at one isolated match (the last one it played on Saturday, because you remember it as you're scrambling to come up with picks for elims), or raw numbers (their match scores were 30-50, etc.)

If you keep track of this by computer and use google docs or the like, you can combine this into one spreadsheet, or if you do it on paper, you can organize it numerically by team, and each scouter can put their pages in the scouting binder in the proper location. You'll have a wealth of useful data by the time you need to start thinking about alliances.


Edit: Oops I forgot the other thing I wanted to say. You can join up with other teams and share scouting data, creating databases to share, or you can have your scouters work together if you don't have 6 people to spare. (: Lots of teams do this, and it works out great!