My Team Needs Help Scouting

[Cartwright]

Like MGoelz and Bree said, 234 uses a set of forms. We try to be exact and accurate in our information. One of our flaws this year is that the scouters didn't always know what to write. It might be a good idea to have a training session to clarify what you want on the forms. Also find a good way to get the information to the people that need it. Especially during Elimination matches, you must be efficient. It is a good idea to assign a scouter to each position on the field (Red 1,2,3 and Blue 1,2,3). This makes it much easier. In addition to this, it is helpful to have 1 or 2 people keep track simply of who is scoring and their quantity of scores. This year, it was important not to see how many tubes the alliance got, but which robot(s) on that alliance scored. This can become difficult when scouters are looking at multiple areas such as maneuverability and speed. Another great thing to look at is their "anti-defensive" abilities. What I mean by this is how good the robot reacts when another robot is playing heavy defense on them. Do they break down? Do they drive away easily? Are they pushed around easily? Some robots are more robust than others, and when you are in a drafting position, this can be an important trait.

[Cooley744]

This year we were really fortunate to have a mentor who taught us that organization is key to scouting. We made an organized graph for pit surveys with key information points. We then had another graph we filled out while watching the robots in matches. These were good because we could put our opinions on them. Lastly, if many people do the surveys it works better. Give one person 5 or 6 robots to really get to know. All the information we collected, whether survey material, or flyers handed out by the teams, we put in a box which had a folder for each team. That way we had fast and easy access to every team. -hope that helps.

[Orfrith]

Thank you to all of the teams that gave your suggestions they were very useful.

[Mike Schreiber]

One of the cool things we do is use laptops for our scouts, and then use thumbdrives (we're working on bluetooth) to transfer everything into a datebase that we can just querry. I am by no means a specialist in this but it seems to work pretty well from what I've seen, as long as your scouts stay focused. It seemed accurate at nationals...233 was the top scorer based on the database and 254 right behind them...But that may be too much of a hassle. Also you could use a database and just enter your forms into it, once again this requires a lot of preparation, but I think it's worth it. Good luck.