Competition season is here LETS GO and I’ve recently received a promotion to scouting lead. Based off my (limited) experience scouting at off season competitions and reading every scouting thread I could get my hands on I’m currently planning on assigning each of our scouters a specific team (or a couple teams, depending on the size of the competition) to scout instead of scouting based on matches. My reasoning here is that scouts having scouts focus on one robot instead of just recording scores for random bots throughout the competition would give them a much better understanding of the robot’s strategy and abilities. My team has historically assigned scouting by matches so I’m kind of going into this idea with no precedent to base my plan on, so I’m wondering if any teams on here have tried a scouting method like this before? What worked and what didn’t? How did you deal with large events? Did it actually result in better data?
I like the idea of certain students being experts on certain robots, maybe checking in with teams if there is a mechanical issue and taking notes.
I don’t like how one student may have 3 robots to pay attention to in one match. I also don’t like how this makes it difficult to schedule folks to scout (it’s hard enough to get the correct people in the scouting seats for a block of 10 matches, especially when a student may be responsible for a robot every other match (when will they get a break?)).
On the flip side videos on TBA are way more consistent than they used to be. So you can look at replays or record the matches yourself, partially solving the 3 robots 1 student problem.
At our second event last season, my team used a combination of pit scoring and match scouting to get an all-around more cohesive idea of the robots we would be playing with.
For match-scouting, we gave each scouter 5~ teams to scout and had them scout 3-5 matches for those teams, so that our 6-7 Scouters wouldn’t be bogged down for the entire event, and got to enjoy more aspects of the competition, as well as be able to watch us during our matches, as if one of the teams they were scouting was in our match, they could just scout some of there other matches, as we didn’t need all of them.
Of course, some were extra enthusiastic about data collection and scouted more than necessary, which was a welcome change to the usual context of scouting which seemed “boring” to many members.
This also made it easier for someone such as myself (who tends to go back-and-forth from the pits to the stands frequently) to contribute to scouting, as it was more fluid, and I was able to get most of the needed data by just scouting the matches or two before our own.
I won’t elaborate on Pit-Scouting, because it seems that you have a pretty thorough idea of what you want to do for that, but if you have any more questions about our scouting strategy, @Gavin0 would be the expert.
The events your team is attending this year have a similar number of teams as the District Events that we attend, so if the size of your scouting pool is similar to ours, hopefully, some of my team’s methodology can carry over.
I hope this provides a decent insight into some scouting ideas for you to consider implementing or modifying for your team.
Good Luck, Happy Scouting!