Looking for suggestions!

[timothyb89]

Hey everyone,

We've been hard at work figuring out what direction FRC-DB should go, and I was hoping some people interested in FRC scouting would be willing to take a new interface we've been working on for a spin.

FRC-DB is a big database of event, team, and match statistics from the 2010 FRC season. It was intended as a tool to help with scouting, but we're hoping to expand it to include a lot more specific team info and robot details, and over the summer hopefully we'll add in data from previous seasons as well. However, in order to make it the best possible resource for everyone, we need to know what info everyone would like to have!

For reference, here's the 'old' interface: http://frcdb.net/
And the new one: http://frcdb.net/?new

Essentially, it's supposed to (aside from looking better) be speedier and work better with mobile browsers (iPhone/iPod browsers in particular). So what we specifically need to know is...

• what's better than the old version
• what's worse than the old version
• new feature ideas
• any other comments and suggestions

One of the other (more specific) things we're in the market for is other statistics to use. We've already got the usual (OPR/DPR, etc) but we're always looking for interesting new ways to look at match data.

Anyway, if you're up to it, take frc-db for a spin and let us know what you think! We're in the process of figuring out a definitive roadmap for its future, and hopefully with everyone's help we can improve it a lot!

-Thanks!
(PS: you can see some of the current ideas floating around over here and hopefully as specific tickets when we get a bit better organized)

[Siri]

Very cool. I really like the new interface!

Here's what I noticed. Note that though I'm a 4-year drive & strategy team veteran, this is my first season as scout team manager for our team. (Also, this is our team's first season with a scout team manager. ) Additionally, I'm not a programmer, so I really don't know what most of this entails or how hard it is/would be.

1) What's better than the old version: Navigation is much smoother, and the aesthetics are very nice. (That "Found 1 matching teams" popup was getting rather annoying, no offense.) URLs are much easier to decipher and manipulate. I love that you can search match results by team number!

2) What's worse than the old version: not much. It'd be nice to get the standings & awards links back for events.

3) New feature ideas:
- It'd be nice if the "teams attending" list gave seeding scores as well. Coopertition and Hanging would be a plus, along with the ability to sort by any of them. Awards would be epic.
- Having match results on the team page would be great.
- Maybe it's just me, but I really don't need the Team Search Results page. If I typed an accurate number/unique name, can it just go to their page? (It could have some other way to get to the general search results.) If they were inactive this year, it'd be nice to have a warning on the top of the page, though.
- The pages for an individual team by event are a neat idea, but it'd be nice if you could get to the overall team page from there. Also, if the "Teams Played With/Against" lists were hyperlinked to those teams as well.
- The team awards section is good, but it's missing most if not all of the 2010 awards. I don't know what the problem is, but the most disconcerting thing is that there's no warning. Even a "This list does not include 2010 Awards" would be helpful.
- The Champions/Finalists award listings (sans 2010) are good. It'd be great to have all the elimination placings, with draft order if possible. Or, at least qualification seed would be nice. I know you can't pull it directly from FIRST's lists, though, which makes it difficult. (1114's database does this, and I've found it invaluable for my own scouting.)
- This may just be my connection, but the site (and just that site) is still running very slowly. Not sure how easy that is to address.

If you're looking for some more quantitative pre-competition scouting metrics, below is a list of what I use in my own scouting. Work in progress, and it's slimmed down to what I find most relevant for a given event (ie doesn't include much history or detail).

Basically I'd love to see number of previous events this season (for quick reference when you're doing 80 teams, I know I can count them ), hanging points (quick though not fool-proof indication of hanging ability), and most of the 1114 and 2834 stats.

List, "+" indicates recommendation. See here for rationales
Team number
Team nickname
+ Number of previous official competitions this season
Name of last official non-championship event, and of championship division if applicable
+ Average score per match at last official non-championship event (2834)
+ Average Winning Margin at last official non-championship event (2834)
+ Elimination Placings this season along with draft number for all official events
Engineering and Other Awards, including multiplicities
+ Average Offensive Score, world percentile (1114)
+ Calculated Contribution, world percentile (1114)
+ Seeding Score, world percentile (1114)
+ Average Defensive Score, world percentile (1114)
+ Contribution to Winning Margin, world rank percentile (2834)
+ Percent of Qualification Matches Won at last non-championship event, and championship division if applicable
+ Percentile Rank at last official non-championship event, and overall championship percentile rank if applicable
+ Hanging Points Scored at last official non-championship event

[timothyb89]

Wow, thanks for some awesome suggestions!

I'm working on standings data (coop. bonus, hanging points, seeding score, etc) right now (our crawler is running as I type this) so we should have that up in an hour or so. I'll also finish up the crawlers for elimination matches and awards so we'll have that data sometime tonight as well.

Awards data we currently have is just going off of the team info pages from FIRST's team finder. We pulled most of our initial data before the season started so most of what we've got doesn't include 2010 events (some data may have it from scans later in the season, though). With the new data we're pulling in tonight, we should be able to correct this.

With the fresh standings data, rankings, seeding scores, co-op. bonuses, and hanging points should also be made available and I'm adding that to our interface right now. As for final standings, I can't say for sure we can get that data as it isn't available from FIRST.

Great suggestions for the extra links as well- they should be added in soon. As for the statistics- great! I'll consult with our resident statistics expert and see what we can do about adding them in with the data we've got. And apologies for the general slowness- the database we're using is pretty slow; I'm planning on replacing it at some point in the near future.

Again, thanks for the suggestions, and keep 'em coming!

[Siri]

No problem, this is an awesome project! Great work by your team, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with next.

Originally Posted by timothyb89

...As for final standings, I can't say for sure we can get that data as it isn't available from FIRST.

Again, I'm not a programmer, but in a way it is. In the elimination match results section of each FIRST event page, the quarter-finalists are the teams that play in the QFs but nots the SFs, and the semifinalists are those that play in the SFs but not the finals. Of course, this gets complicated if there's a replacement bot. (I guess you'd need to look for alliance sets that share teams, rather than that are exactly the same. I have no idea how to do that.) Back before I discovered the wonder was is 1114's scouting, I used to to this by hand. It might be an interesting project if you're up for it, but I have no idea what it entails technically. Good work, regardless!

[EricH]

Final standings are typically available. However, you can't go to the team's page for it--go to the event pages and hit the "standings" link for the event you want.

For example, the San Diego standings are at http://www2.usfirst.org/2010comp/eve.../rankings.html

Also note that there are links on that page to match results, match schedules, and awards. These links just might become your new best friend... TBA scrapes these pages for their data, I believe.

[Chris is me]

I don't know what you do differently than TBA other than give me OPR averages, which aren't very accurate anyway. If you're going to do that, at least also list Highest OPR and Last Event OPR too.

[timothyb89]

Originally Posted by Siri

Again, I'm not a programmer, but in a way it is. In the elimination match results section of each FIRST event page, the quarter-finalists are the teams that play in the QFs but nots the SFs, and the semifinalists are those that play in the SFs but not the finals. Of course, this gets complicated if there's a replacement bot. (I guess you'd need to look for alliance sets that share teams, rather than that are exactly the same. I have no idea how to do that.) Back before I discovered the wonder was is 1114's scouting, I used to to this by hand. It might be an interesting project if you're up for it, but I have no idea what it entails technically. Good work, regardless!

Figuring that out should be an interesting project! I've heard 1114 does it by hand, but hopefully we won't have to resort to that (I'm no fan of manual data entry!). At the very least I'll make sure to add in a "farthest point" stat for teams (ie, "this team finished at the qualifications/quarterfinals/etc").

Originally Posted by EricH

Final standings are typically available. However, you can't go to the team's page for it--go to the event pages and hit the "standings" link for the event you want.

For example, the San Diego standings are at http://www2.usfirst.org/2010comp/eve.../rankings.html

Also note that there are links on that page to match results, match schedules, and awards. These links just might become your new best friend... TBA scrapes these pages for their data, I believe.

I just added that in last night- we have a clone of FIRST's pages with that data up now (such as this one). Now we're just looking for something interesting to do with that new data!
(Those pages are actually where we collect all of our data- a great resource put up by FIRST!)

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I don't know what you do differently than TBA other than give me OPR averages, which aren't very accurate anyway. If you're going to do that, at least also list Highest OPR and Last Event OPR too.

Just added in highest OPR. Not sure what you mean by 'Last Event OPR', though... could you clarify that?

We've got some things TBA doesn't have yet (mostly OPR/other stats and standings at this point), although admittedly not too much. But over the summer we'll be adding lots of new features to help justify the db's existence .

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by timothyb89

Just added in highest OPR. Not sure what you mean by 'Last Event OPR', though... could you clarify that?

Nice adds. Last Event OPR is just the OPR of the last event that team attended. It helps show if they improved a lot compared to their average OPR.