Or is it stingy?
Well see, the thing is. There are a lot of scouting methods out there that deal with electronic gizmos or using laptops (or even a Nintendo DS) but uh, let’s say we’re short on cash. Does anyone have a method or a paper with questions on it relating specifically to this game? Or any helpful tips for what should be on our scouting sheets?
Any help would be greatly appreciated! 
In the last few years we’ve made some sheets where you just check boxes and write down numbers and as long as you can get some paper and clip boards your fine. Then we would input the data into an excel document with a page for every team so that at a minutes notice we could pull up info on the teams. We also brought a small printer with us so that we could print out info sheets and give them to our drivers before a match. The system relies on reliable information though. That was our scouting downfall last year, we had issues keeping our scouting info good.
We haven’t written our scouting sheets yet, but team 190 sticks with simple stuff. We use a 2 part system: paper sheets for scouting teams in the pits, and an excel spreadsheet for recording match data. An example of what we might have for our pit data this year:
Drivetrain: Number of wheels, Number of wheels driven
Manipulator: Notes go here
Able to violate 80": Yes/No
The excel spreadsheet will have observational data about what each team does in hybrid and teleop, and how many ways they score points. That’s about it. We need 5-6 pages of paper for the pit-data and a laptop (which can easily be replaced with some lined paper)
We have done paper scouting for years and it has served us very well (check out our past finishes). We make a pit sheet to gather robot data and then a match sheet and try to get as many teams as possible and as many matches as possible so we have a good account for who does what and what not.
Some people downplay the effectiveness of pit scouting, but if you don’t have the resources to run a match scouting system (without an electronic match scouting system, I think you’d hard pressed to get much usable information from all that raw data), a pit scouting system is better than nothing. At Palmetto last year, we assembled a “Scouting Bible” with the pit scouting sheets from all the teams at the event. We found it pretty useful; before a match, we could tell our partners the best way to defend based on their drivesystem and how it stacked up with our opponents, and I think that is a pretty valuable thing. A system like that is also pretty easy to do, and does not require any fancy equipment.
Just make sure you have people who can make sense of all your info. Our detailed drive system scouting, for example, would be useless to most members of our team, and probably many others; I just happen to specialize in drive systems, so I can pretty accurately predict how one will behave based on the scouting sheet. Make sure you don’t waste your time collecting information you can’t use.
In the past we have tried both electronic and paper scouting, but so far neither way has been effective since our scouting information doesn’t usually make it to alliance pickings. Someone is usually still walking around with the clipboard or computer. However, this year we were thinking of trying something slightly different. We want to have one master sheet to keep in our pit with a list of all the teams attending the regional and several columns such as “drive train”, “scoring”, “performance”, etc. In addition, we would like to duplicate this sheet and send it out with several people: around the pits, in the stands. Occasionally our scouts will report back to the pit area and add their information to the sheet. That way we hope to have a good idea of what each robot does and how well it performs. And when it is time for the fateful alliance pickings, whoever our team representative is can just grab the master copy and won’t have to look for it. To my knowledge we haven’t done this before, so unfortunately I cannot say it is a tried-and-true method, but we have high hopes, as always.
My team has found that trying to get a computer to tell you who to pick is nearly impossible (and often wrong). In the past we have tried to quatify a robots qualities, but found that having a person who watches all the matches and takes basic notes is highly effective. We will attempt to record match stats using paper and pencil (then putting it into an excel spreadsheet for organization). My main advise is don’t try to get something to tell you who to pick, just have experienced and knowledgeable team member watch and see who you will work with best (not who is the best necessarily).
Hm, well see. We have a laptop with an excel spreadsheet. But I want to have a pit scout team to move about with papers. Does anyone know where I can maybe find one already made because the scout mentor (go figure) is looking for one
I have the scouting sheet we used last year. Its in open office *.ods format, but if you want i can send it to you in almost any format. Its very simple, but effective
please David send it in a word document or notepad or something simple that a basic computer can handle.
ill try to put it into word but can you read excel
and what is your e-mail
Um, I dunno. Our school is pretty uptight about restriction (we have nothing on the computer) but send it to me that way I suppose.
here is a link to it as a website
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pkx7RqrNvNcv4URPWCho7fA
appreciate it 
We seem to have done ok with 6 students sitting in the stands recording points scored by each robot, as well as defensive maneuvers, bonus points, autonomous/hybrid score, penalties, and whatnot. Performance seems to be far more important than anything else…so just concentrate on recording performance of the teams, if you can make a relatively simple spreadsheet Friday night that ranks them and figure out kind of which teams you’ll want to pick for your alliance (if you are a relatively good seed) that should be all you need from scouting.
Pit scouting is fun because you get to see the robots and talk to the nice people…but performance on the field might be more important in the end.
Ditto for 330 (and hopefully 1135 this year), except that the spreadsheet is set up long before Friday…it’s just populated then. Saturday is also important; sometimes a team has a serious breakdown–or a “nirvana” moment.
Pit scouting is used to help figure out about the team and the robot’s potential characteristics.
It’s typically a bad idea to rely only on statistics for your scouting data. Situational circumstances matter a lot, especially with the random matches. Other often less considered information such as how well a team works with an alliance and how well they respond to changes in game situations is very hard, if not impossible, to quantify, but can often make or break an eliminations alliance. I’ve seen many teams fall prey to this because a team that looked great on paper didn’t come through in the pinch.
That one person sitting there can make all the difference…
For scouting, the only hard advice I can give is something that’s been given many times before : a picture is worth a thousand words.
No matter how much data you collect, friday night when you are reviewing the day making a rough sketch of what picks you may make : it’s really hard to remember robots by team numbers. My best advice to you is to get someone to go and take pictures, with a number in the picture, of every robot. Multiple angles if possible, trying to get their manipulator. It’s always the best from my experience.
I absolutely agree. Often, even with extensive scouting - and I think we have one of the more extensive scouting systems - there are still “holes” in the data. I make it a priority to get multiple shots of the teams on Thursday, and then any updates to the robot’s configuration on Friday. That way, on Friday night when we begin to look at alliance partners, we also look at the pictures. There are more times than I can count where we saw the picture and said, “Oh yeah, they were the team that did …” and while we have antidotal info on them, the scouting sheets and records failed to record them. With 6 teams competing every couple of minutes, there are some aspects that we see, but fail to record. Photos help “remind” you of that info.
Also, to address another point mentioned in an earlier post, I agree that performance data is much more important than pit data. We still collect a lot of pit data, but really it has a different purpose. Pit data is a good way to know who the teams are, it acts as a PR function, it gets the students involved in talking to teams, and I have found that our newest team members - usually Freshman and Sophomores - actually learn a lot about the robots when they have to ask how many CIMS, what type of transmission, Omnis vs Mecanums, etc… Secondly, it also keeps them busy, and out of trouble if they have something to do! But, while we record all that data - it is the performance data that tells us how compete in each match. What our alliance partners can do, what the opposing alliance can do, what type of strategy should we employ, etc… and then, finally, it helps us when we are then picking our alliance partners in the finals.
I tell our students that we will lose one, that we should have won, because something unforeseen will happen, but we will win one that we should have lost because of good scouting. That is our scouting mantra!
Best regards,
Steve
Same here! Thanks for providing a great explanation of the different aspects of scouting. We take pictures and put them on a laptop in the pits, we have the scouts make notes about which teams seem to be working well together on the field, and we do pit scouting (mostly to get to know the other teams). It all works together, but the performance data from match scouting seems to be most important.
We are developing the Nintendo DS scouting system because we were so impressed with the effectiveness and ease of use of 842’s automated scouting system…and we realized that almost all our team members have a DS, so the hardware is mostly paid for…and our main programmer Kevin likes challenges. The real bottleneck with paper scouting is putting the data into a spreadsheet so you can use it easily. An automated scouting system (using whatever you have available or can buy) makes this a painless process, and also allows you to quickly integrate the data from Saturday morning.