I am hosting a series of weekly scouting/strategy workshops starting this Wednesday, 6/4! These sessions will be open to anyone who wants to join. I’ll be presenting on Zoom (link to be sent later), but if you cannot attend live, all recordings will be posted to YouTube. These were originally going to be targeted only towards our team’s students, but we had some interest from other teams’ mentors, so we figured we could open them up to the world (shoutout to my scouting leads for designing the flyer and naming the workshops!). These will not be heavily technical at all in terms of robot design- sessions 2 and 3 will include some Google Sheets lessons that will be targeted toward folks without extensive prior experience. A bit more info on each workshop:
Session 1 (this upcoming Wednesday 6/4) will cover high-level game/robot strategy and will go through successful robot traits season by season.
Session 2 (6/11) will include quantitative data collection habits as well as a look into how we convert raw data into useable numbers in Sheets.
Session 3 (6/18) will build on session 2, working through how to analyze and visualize the cleaned data in Google Sheets, as well as how to build metrics that can guide your decisions.
Session 4 (6/25) will go through our entire match strategy process including what we do as a drive team before, during, and after matches.
Session 5 (7/2) will discuss how we ensure we are prepared to make and how we land on our alliance selection decisions.
I will most likely not be using the full 2 hours on these; I am just leaving plenty of buffer time for Q&A. Feel free to listen in and ask me about any of our team’s questionable decisions from over the years!
Also, so I can get a rough idea of how many non-422 members might be attending, drop a thumbs up on this if you may be interested in any of these.
Hey! I was wondering what your team’s overarching strategy is to setting up favorable elims alliances.
We’re interested in figuring out how to more reliably seed first, mostly so that we can scorch our fields and ruin the tournament for whatever poor soul seeds 10th.
Currently, we purely rely on pics from TBA, self-reported match statistics, wheel counts, and overall vibes, but we’re wondering if we should expand out our dataset by including team clout (as measured by CD posts per week).
Additionally, what sort of ritual sacrifices do you use to appease the match generating algorithm? Our last one escaped off the hotel balcony during DCMP and it tanked our ranking. Also, please let me know what you sacrificed for your Champs match schedule / field assignment so we can literally never do it again.
Don’t want to give away all of our secrets, but team clout is a wonderful metric. You might want to look into other quantitative statistics like # of sponsors and reveal video views. You should also start researching the percentage of students on a given team who know how to Dougie: we’ve found a high correlation with this and elimination round success. (Note- this will absolutely not be covered in our workshops)
Additionally, what sort of ritual sacrifices do you use to appease the match generating algorithm?
Just sacrifice your sanity and you will be good to go.
Also, please let me know what you sacrificed for your Champs match schedule / field assignment so we can literally never do it again.
We had some students try sacrificing their grades- it didn’t work. Stay in school, kids!
Session 3 today at 5:30 Eastern! We will look at how our team builds meaningful metrics for analyzing robot performance (and do some more Google Sheets work)
Same Link: Launch Meeting - Zoom
Link to last session’s recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZLcks_cYbU
Session 4 is tomorrow @ 5:30pm! We will be diving into the details of every step of our match strategy process. We’ve put a good amount of effort into honing this skill over the last few years; I think this session will be valuable to folks of just about any level of experience. The next two workshops should be the best! Session 3s recording will be posted soon. Same zoom link as usual:
Our final session is tomorrow (today) at 5:30 pm Eastern! We will be discussing alliance selection principles, walking through our preparation process, and breaking down/reflecting on every alliance selection decision we made in 2024 and 2025. Feel free to join and ask questions about anything in this session, anything in any of the other sessions, or any other info you are curious about!
I’ll have session 4 posted shortly- sessions 1 and 5 will likely be up after IRI (so ~2 weeks). I’ll be putting all of the sessions on their own channel, which should hopefully make them easier for folks to find.
