Team 1538 is very excited to be opening up our scouting software to the rest of the FIRST community!
Inspired by Kiet Chau’s iScout, we initially developed CowScout during the 2010 season for our own private use. Upon seeing the program’s success, many people have requested that we make the software available to other teams. Starting later this summer we will be opening CowScout to any team who wishes to use it.
Here are some of CowScout’s features:
Online Scouting Database
CowScout runs off a remote web server so your scouting data is available from any device with internet access. In addition CowScout will save scouting data from past events.
Public and Private Scouting Data
Each team can manage their own data and decide what data they’d like to share with the world and which data they would like to keep private.
Data Analysis
CowScout provides up to date team reports, leader boards, charts, graphs and performance histories.
Event Archive
CowScout features an archive of match results, rankings, awards and OPR for events dating back to 2003. During a live event, CowScout automatically scrapes data from FIRST.
Become a Beta Tester! Go here to sign up! We will be inviting a select few to help us beta test the new features we have added and have setup a landing page for your team to sign up. Leave us your email address and we’ll contact you when space is available.
It seems interesting! I like the graphs it shows. Also, does it rely on member input, or input from an external source, such as a moderator? Besides that, it’s looking good! I can’t wait until it comes out!
It doesn’t solely rely on member input. CowScout has a built in scraper that pulls match data from FIRST. At the moment it calculates OPR data and I am sure other features will be added in the future.
A mentor can create a team and scouts can create accounts and request to join the team. Once they’re in a team they can start entering stats. The data sits in a “temporary” section of the database where a lead scout for the team can approve or delete it as well as make on-the-fly corrections.
This idea sounds really interesting. I love the courage that teams, namely you and the poofs, are displaying to make scouting a full-fledged part of how we collaborate in FRC. I’m really excited to see the early details in the beta.
This program reminds me of an idea that I considered implementing on my team in order to save resources, make scouting more accessible to those that like to or need encouragement to begin dialogue with students from other teams as well as more accessible to the collaborative goals of FIRST, and to begin to fight poor scouting.
Let me know if this has similar qualities:
The team would eliminate the common waste of paper through scouting by only using six laminated sheets and recording both specific objective notes and notes regarding its role with those teams with which it plays both offensively and defensively. After each match, perhaps there would be an extra set of sheets to allow time, this collected information, objective, subjective and relative, would be recorded onto a cloud template on only a single laptop that the team could choose to share with other teams easily following the shared dialogue of the two teams regarding scouting etc. That other team could then input their own information into this document. Ideally, this one document could contain information from almost all teams at the event, allow them to understand their role in the game from the perspective of others and, of course, develop meaningful social relationships between teams more widely than the teams’ drive teams or that which is limited to a team social.
When I read about CowScout, this is what first came to my mind-a structural opportunity to share scouting information, a means to limit paper and expensive technology per team and a great way to improve networking, social opportunities for students and as a result the overall quality of scouting.
Great site! I saw it said “Match schedule” in the regional area, and got excited thinking your website could tell the future. Oh well. Great site anyways! Can’t wait to use it!
Hallry, I used the link you posted registered, etc and it’s working fine for me.
Thus far, it seems that CowScout is what we’ll be using this year, I set our team up in about 5 minutes while doing a bunch of other stuff - it’s so intuitive.
I know for sure 256 will be using CowScout this year! And the next one. And the next one. And the next one, unless something better comes out. (Cowscout 2.0?)
Expanding on customization, how are the parameters determined for what info gets scouted? Like, in the demos it showed tubes hung, what if we wanted to get more specific into top row, middle, or bottom? Can that be customized?
We plan to add offseasons / VRC sometime after this season.
CowScout lets you look at leader boards for tubes scored low / middle / high. We’ll make sure that we collect enough data to accurately represent an alliance’s score.
Oh well. Great site anyways! Can’t wait to use it!