How does your team scout?

[Mop Iii Top]

Our robotics team is not very big, so we only have 1-2 people scouting. At Traverse City, I was the only one scouting. At GVSU, we had 3. At TC, what I did was sit down in the stands, get some snacks, and get a pencil and paper. I numbered the match numbers as I went down the page. For every match, I was looking for the robots with good offence, defence, lifter, auto, and good kickers. After all the qualifying matches were over, I looked at my page and put in the informantion on a excel spreadsheet. I rated the robot's abilities on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being bad, 10 being good). I rated them on kicker strength, accuracy, far zone ability, middle zone ability, near zone ability, speed, autonomous, defence, aggressiveness, and a space on the side for extra notes. When it came to alliance selection, all we had to do was look on the spreadsheet and make a list from 1-? of the picks we would want on our alliance. We ended up as 3rd seed, but the captains of the first alliance picked us. This scouting system failed in the end. I did not write anything down on the lowest robots. When it came to picking our third alliance partner, we didn't have any information to help our alliance partner pick a third robot.
At GVSU, I tried to fix this problem by writing down things on the lower robots. I had my teamate bring up a listing of the places on his computer, and tell me the 2 lowest seeded robots in this match. This didn't really work either. Mabye the fact that I was volunteering the first day, I only had the second day of qualifying to scout. Hopefully next year our scouting system will be better.