Motivating your Scouts

[E Dawg]

We personally take rounds doing scouting. Students A, B, and C scout in the morning while students D, E, and F scout in the afternoon. (Of course, you may want more than three people scouting.)

This not only keeps the scouts from getting fed up with their job, but also allows everyone on the team a chance to put in their $0.02 on each robot.

[Nicole1396]

Originally Posted by CalTran

I learned about it from Karthik Smith himself. (The link takes you to his 2012 Effective FIRST Strategy and Design presentation.)

I don't think Kissing is allowed lol

[lethc]

All we need to do is make it known to ALL scouters how important the data collected is to elimination matches. Even if you're not a top 8 seed, your information is still useful if you're a second pick, as you can confer with the drafter to select a robot with the best fit for your alliance. Also, if you're going to multiple competitions, the data will still hold some weight to the robots and will help you in qualification matches.

I personally scouted almost every qualification match at worlds for my team. I found it rewarding to help the team in finding good alliance partners. We have volunteers that organize scouting and hand out the sheets we used, and if I wanted to continue scouting after my shift was up, they were all for it. Maybe I'm just a weird one for enjoying scouting?

[sosheskaz]

I think one of the biggest reasons kids don't like scouting is because they feel like they're stuck with it and like they're just getting boring busy work. If you have people on the drive team who are willing to come up and scout in between matches for fun, and they let the younger kids know that they enjoy it, it makes an impact on their view of scouting. Similarly, having mentors there who are actively showing their enthusiasm about scouting, students will follow suit. Loud is fun. Having people

Apart from that, you need to cycle people. No matter who it is, just writing down what robots do match after match gets tedious. Doing 60-minute stints generally works well. Arranging scouting alliances with other teams can help if you have a small team.

Giving scouts higher-up roles (handing out scouting sheets, helping out in data input, making sure people are on-schedule, etc.), in my experience, makes them take scouting more seriously, because they feel more important.

Apart from that, giving out scout treats every match (we used starbursts last year) gives a boost to morale.