Hello! I was wondering some good ways to make a good scouting app. We used in the past a website hosted online and it was a html website with a dictionary and it wasn’t pretty or aplicable. What are some past ways you guys have built your scouting apps?
Also, we struggle as a team to get everyone to put correct data (e.g. switching name and team number). Just simple errors that ruin our data. Any tips? We do try to teach them and do lessons every time before the compitions. Any tips? Thanks!
Until you can get a handle on this you are not going to derive much value.
Focusing on an app is putting the cart before the horse.
Finally, data collection is only a small part of the equation, analysis and acting on the results are the other components of this fire triangle.
Lots of good stuff on CDChief Delphi if you give a quick search.
Eg:
There are tons and tons of Open source apps and hosted apps our team was using QR scout before we developed our own. I would suggest using a scouting system that someone else has already made and you can just adapt for you team, it means that there’s already a reliable system in place all you have to do is personalize it
Having offline functionality is really useful because lots of places don’t have reliable internet, or data and using hotspots in the stands is not allowed. There are lots of ways to do it online, I tether my phone to a computer to give it data and upload our data to a spreadsheet that other people use. There are definitely other ways to do it but this is by far the easiest and simplest. Our team is looking into using Bluetooth to transfer data between tablets we use to collect data and the computer to organize data.
If your set on making your own scouting app, I suggest making a pwa (progressive web app) or a simple HTML website that’s running off an HTML file downloaded on the device your running. Then make the HTML website produce QR codes when you finish inputting data.
As for tips on getting accurate scouting data make sure you have only necessary questions you use when looking at what is good and bad in teams and directly effects their standing in your own ranking lists.
Make sure your scouters knows very well what every question means.
Collect qualitative as well as quantitative data because having someone that knows What a good robot looks like and can take good notes.
It’s also super good to have scouting training, like watching videos of matches and training scouts on the game, and getting people familiar with the scouting app. It may be a little boring for people that don’t enjoy scouting but it will benefit you in the long run with better data.
There are SO MANY threads and posts on this topic. Entering “scouting app” into search produces results that will keep you occupied for days or longer with rich information about development language, deployment platform, interface design, data storage and transfer, and much more.
Just this one topic includes links to 11 different scouting systems. There are plenty more that are just a few clicks away.
One tip (among many others) for trying to get higher fidelity data is to design the scouting app to minimize the chance of data errors. For example, scouts should not be ABLE to switch name and team number. The team number field should be limited to numeric input. Scouts should see an error in the app if trying to put alpha characters in the team number field. It would be even better if the app had a list of participating team numbers which could be selected by pulldown or a text field team number input could be checked against the list. More generally, try to limit the use of text input fields in favor of boolean switches, radio buttons, or dropdowns. Try to use click-to-count buttons rather than text input to count repeated actions. Use color-coding where applicable (e.g. cones have yellow buttons, cubes have purple buttons). Try to replicate scoring geometry in the app interface where applicable (e.g. buttons for high-scoring location are above the buttons for low-scoring location).
Excellent threads posted above. To tack on other thoughts…
One of the best non-app ways I’ve seen to deal with scouting data is one piece of paper per team. Each paper has the same grid on it - columns for the data you’re collecting (talley marks, checkboxes, etc) and each row is for one match. Lead scout passes out the pieces of paper, collects em back at the end.
Still requires manual data entry, but makes the collection process way easier than one-paper-per-match.
As far as app/website development goes, the rule of thumb: Displaying things to a user is easy. Collecting data back is hard.
Here is a link to a site that our scouting mentor put up.
We use Google Sheets with AppSheet for our scouting. Our app will automatically fill in team name and number as long as you know which position you are scouting, i.e. Red 1, Blue 2, etc.
FIRST Robotics – The Quips
Thank you!
Our students put one together for this previous season and will be modifying one for the upcoming season.
One of the feature enhancements I was excited to have the students develop was to pull team numbers from TBA (stored as a csv list) and then each match the team number they are scouting gets automatically included (and it tells them what they need to scout). This sure beats having to yell at the kids which one they were scouting.
I’m glad you recognized data integrity issues, because crap in = crap out.
The thing our team is hopefully going to start tackling is identifying what information is actually being used/needed by drive team and pick list development and really focusing on collecting that data. We would pit scout a whole bunch, but we are talking about potentially stopping that all together as we haven’t been using that data like at all.
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