FRC 1501 and FRC 3494 have had a longstanding scouting partnership since 2018. This partnership has allowed us to gather invaluable, accurate data while splitting the work load, both for application development and the process of scouting at the event.
However, five years in, we are ready to expand this relationship and are looking for other teams to join us!
To give you a better idea of our plans for this expansion, here are a few key points:
- We hope to scout all five (4 districts + state championship) FIN events in 2024, providing a complete dataset for the season.
- We are developing a configurable offline-ready web app to support our needs, with the goal of completing development by 2024 Kickoff. We should only have to create our 2024 configuration after kickoff.
- We will push the data to the cloud in real time, allowing your team to access the data both for qualification match strategy and for alliance selections.
- We will not be providing an out of box data viewing application. Instead, we strive to provide easy ways to connect to our cloud-hosted database, meaning that your team can design whatever data analysis platform they wish. This can be as simple as an Excel pivot table or as complicated as a custom web application. The information necessary to start building your data viewing platform should be available within a few weeks of kickoff. You will need your own device to view the data on, appropriate for the method you are using to view it.
- We only ask you for a few things - we will have a couple planning meetings to prepare for in-season events (and we will want a team representative to participate in each), and we will expect your team to provide scouts at each district event you attend. The amount required and duration will vary based on how many teams indicate interest.
- We will hold a scout training session prior to the first 2024 district event to ensure that everyone is answering our scouting questions accurately and uniformly.
- If your team has students interested in being involved in the scouting app development process, we are actively working on this now and would welcome collaborators.
Team 1501 is attending week 1 (Mishawaka) and week 4 (Plainfield). Team 3494 is attending week 3 (Columbus) and week 4 (Plainfield). Though neither of us will be in attendance at week 5, we are willing to remotely support the teams who are attending that event and using our scouting platform.
If you have any questions, please reach out! We would love to have you join our little data-driven family.
I’ll dm you a link to our discord server.