Team 360 has tried a variety of formats for scouting in past years, ranging from paper sheets for every match, to the Wii Remote Scouting System created by a mentor of Team 842, and have used a heavily-macro’d Excel spreadsheet for a couple years now. But we are always looking for new effective ideas from other teams.
What does your team use to gather information? What information is always important from year to year? What do you think will be the most important parameters to track this year?
First question you must ask:
Do we scout so we know who to pick in the finals?
or
Do we scout so we have an advantage each match, during elims.
Why do you have to pick one or the other? What is the difference between the two groups you mentioned?
I agree with you. If you are collecting data to help your alliance picks then why can’t you then use that same data to help you play against the teams?
One thing that Chillout 1778 experimented with was doing as much hardware scouting on day 1 of a regional, when it’s inspection and practice matches, in order to make up some pre match briefs for the drive team. It was a 1 sheet print out that would help them get a better idea of what was about to happen in the qualifiers.
unfortunately all my scouting efforts were some what wasted as our over complicated kicker failed on us and we realized to late that it was a hardware and not a software problem.
The main difference is a team’s strategy. In qualifiers, alliance teams will tell you their strategy, and you’ll knoe how effective they are via OPR, DPR, or other stats. For selections, you must know a team’s strategy for yourself. In 2010 we had everything from start position, to # of bump climbs and balls moved or scored from each zone. This means we could recreate what a team did in an entire match, and all of every team’s matches. This way, we knew exactly what the team’s strategy was without asking.
We even began incorporating match video from the same event as the season wore on. This is all nearly overkill, but is really useful with its quantitativeness.
ok the thing with scouting is how many kids you have on your team that can scout…we use a custom made scouting program each year made by our amazing scout mentor, and everyone scouts each robot on paper (6 students) and one person inputing the data into the program and we carry the laptop around the pits this helps us during seating matchs by knowing how to plan a stratagy against the other alliance (info helping us know what our partners can do also what our opponents can do) and of course this info helps tremendesly with elim. 
hope i could help if you need a sample of our scouting sheet or screenshots of the scouting programs just email me at [email protected]
also in this game scouting is going to be very easy
-pegs (we just drew the pegs and the kids will x if the robot hangs it and circle it if its a ubertube)
-minibot (1st,2nd,3rd,4th)
-auto start (middle or outer)
-auto score (yes or no)