A group of us mentors and our teams have developed what we hope is a comprehensive scouting program. Like in actual basketball, you track the shot locations with it. It then prints the data to a CSV file so you can import it into an excel spreadsheet we will release soon that will analyze and track the data for all the teams at your regional, giving you and your alliance the best outcome possible.
The program and spreadsheet along with related help files are linked at our groups website http://www.mngofirst.org/helpful-links.html. There’s also a web version and mobile app for WP7 that do general score tracking.
You can find us at any of the Minnesota, Wisconsin, or LA regionals and Champs. Just ask for a GO FIRST member or find the scouting teams we should be setting up (except at the LA regional and Champs). I (the developer) will be at 10,000 Lakes in MN if you are in the area and would like to get involved with future developments. Source code will be released in due time. Does require Windows to run.
I worked with the GO FIRST scouting spreadsheet from last year, and I want to say what they had last year was amazing. And when I saw it last it was still in beta form. But they had some amazing ideas on where they were going with it. You can bet I’ll be using this at 10k Lakes and Lake Superior this year.
On a side note GO FIRST is super helpful in at least the Minnesota Region. They are a group of college students that attend the University of Minnesota. They have some very dedicated members helping around the cities and I doubt I could count on my fingers how many teams they help out.
Wow, this is awesome guys. Thanks so much! I hope my new scouts can handle this. Will the spreadsheet be out in time for Week 1?
One thing for any future updates: can we track being on the center bridge with an opponent versus being balanced with them, since they count differently? I guess we could technically get that from the match’s published Co-op points, though.
When this was made, co-op points really weren’t factored in. Our main focus was on how to build a strategy to best defend against your opponent and how each of your alliance members can best contribute.
I’ll have to check with the guy developing the sheet. I think he’s still working on how to best weight each data point in strategy building, but the main intent anyways is to be able to make scatter plots of where each team takes shots from. The data is normalized so you can take all the data from every match a team has been in and see where they take shots and calculate their percent accuracy from that.
The spreadsheet will be out for week 2 for sure, so sorry to the week 1 regionals. Check back anyways just in case. Last year’s spreadsheet for Friday and Saturday I believe predicted >86% of match outcomes, so it’s definitely worth the wait. For a day of data collecting with something as unpredictable as FRC, we consider this to be pretty good.
Thanks for the positive feedback also. We try our best to help students enjoy their experience and to give back to the community.