15-02-2007 21:45

JackN

Re: paper: Martian Scouting Sheets

Does anyone have ideas on how to improve this? I would really love to hear them.

15-02-2007 22:15

EricLeifermann

Re: paper: Martian Scouting Sheets

It looks good to me. The only thing is that driver skill is a very subjective thing. It really depends on the match and what strategy the particular team has.

18-02-2007 18:43

Cyberguy34000

Re: paper: Martian Scouting Sheets

Looks pretty good. Just a few suggestions.

"Points They Score" should probably be changed to "Tubes they score" just because the points will fluctuate by powers of two, while tubes scored is something fairly measurable.

If you manage to fill out all this information, it could be very useful. If you don't have enough manpower though, (I'd recommend at least 6 in the stands, 1 for each bot), then I predict you'll run into quite a few problems.

You might also want to consider how you are planning on using these scouting sheets. Flipping through 50 pages of team information can be time consuming, and can become a problem if you've got a short window to plan strategy for a match. And since you might have 4-5 copies of these 50 some-odd pages for each of your scouts to use, compiling all that data together the night before finals could become a nightmare.


You might want to consider seeing if you can put more than one team per page, it'll tremendously cut down on the amount of paper you'll have to deal with, and when you get pressed for space, you'll begin to realize what information is absolutely necessary to record, and what data you can afford to do without. If you do end up trying to fit more than 1 team on a page, I would strongly suggest using frames as opposed to tables. Word's formatting is evil and of the pit of Hades, and will do diabolical things to you if you are not careful (shudder).

Whatever you end up deciding to do, thinking through and preparing this early before the regional will help you go very far. Good luck to you and your team in competition.

-Chris

18-02-2007 19:31

Ianworld

Re: paper: Martian Scouting Sheets

I think this is a good sheet but I have an issue with it(and most scouting sheets.) Numbers are useful for choosing teams and for highlighting teams that are consistently succesful or rooting out teams that aren't obviously very effective.

However I like to have a very human perspective on robots. People are recording these statistics not machines so they can make judgements a little bit more advanced than just if they scored a tube or not. Try making a section for writing down how to play defense on the robot. The goal being notes like, "if you push them from the front they often drop their tube" or "if you just sit in front a spider leg they won't be able to score there." You might also want a box for how they interact with opposing robots, "They often run defense by driving sideways in front of the goal, place ringers on the side of the spider if they are playing defense in this manner."

Notes like that give you a much better sense of the robot you're facing in the context of how a driver is going to handle their robot. As a driver I relied on information like this to know when to play defense, which goals to go for and what to watch for in opposing robots.

Also one other addition to this sheet is a a drawing or two of the playing field that you can use to draw out the exact path the team takes during autonomous. It comes in handy when trying to plan defense autonomous modes or when trying avoid one of their defense autonomous modes.

18-02-2007 21:50

EricH

Re: paper: Martian Scouting Sheets

330 tried that on 217 in the Archimedes qualifiers last year. We knew where they were going (and where their partners were going) and we knew we had to win automode. Two robots came out to shoot--just in time to have two defenders pile through one of them and send it to the field border. Missed 217 though--and went on to lose.

18-02-2007 23:54

JackN

Re: paper: Martian Scouting Sheets

Cyberguy, Our scouting team is every student that isn't in the pits (15ish), and we have each team assigned to a member of that group. I don't know if I made it clear or not, each of these papers is for a team. Yes it is a lot but we are able to quickly weed out the lower tier teams by having our scouts tells us which teams they like and don't like from their group that was assigned to them.

Ian, I like this idea and will work to add it in.

Thanks to everyone who is posting this helpful comments