paper: Citrus Circuits 2015 Scouting System White Paper

[Citrus Dad]

Thanks much for the compliment. The students have worked very hard on the evolution of this system since we started it in the 2013 season. It was critical to our success in 2013 and 2014--it wasn't quite as important for this year's game because we were scouting for different types of attributes.

To answer your questions:
We had a larger group of students, but for Central Valley and Champs our travel squad was limited to 20, which left us with a pool of 10 scouts. 8 rotated through the regular scouting and 2 focused on super scouting. Mentors, or one of the programmers would step in for short relief at times. At Sacramento which is in Davis, we had a larger pool, and I think we had a couple more at Silicon Valley.

We trained this year watching most of the Dallas Regional for a day. We live streamed another regional last year, so the training session is about 4 hours. We have shorter follow up sessions with particular scouts. We had a system to check the accuracy of the inputs for each scouting tablet, and we record who used the tablet, so we can ensure that everyone is using the same standards for inputs.

Along with the 20 students on the travel team, we had about 8 mentors and half a dozen parents. We officially had about 50 students on the team, but fewer regular participants by the end of the year. Everyone attends the Sacramento/Davis regional (they can bike to UCD), and many go to Silicon Valley for the day (it's a 2 hour drive).

We're starting planning for the coming year, so contact us soon. We'd love to get teams up on the system--it's a great programming opportunity.

Originally Posted by sciencenuetzel

So I read the scouting Whitepaper and I am impressed. I am still kinda new to FRC and I know that you guys won the World Championship this year (Congratulations). I didn't know that you were Einstein Finalists in 2014, and Einstein Semi-Finalists in 2013. In 2012 you were 1 point away from semi-finals of your division being ranked 14th out of 100 teams. Obviously you guys seem know what you are doing. Right now, what I don't understand is why there is no discussion on this thread.

Three questions concerning the training of the scouts...
Am I correct in assuming that you only had 8 different scouts and 2 super scouts that rotated throughout the entire season?

Secondly, did you said that the scouts train by watching an ENTIRE live-streamed event and scout those matches as a pre-cursor to your first competition?

You talk about the travel team. Roughly how many students/mentors do you have that travel? How many students are considered a part of the team but do NOT travel to competitions?

You mention that you are highly interested in helping develop the FRC scouting community and opening up the power of an electronic scouting system. My scout lead will be contacting you guys before build season.