I am the Student lead of our Strategy and Scouting sub-teams, as well as the team captain on MAGNAtech 3468. We started scouting last year and it showed at lot of promise but since then I’ve been the only person keeping it alive. I’m taking people from other sub-teams to do scouting at competition and I think i’ll have a good amount of people but I am at a loss for what to do to help them past just collecting data.
We are using scoutradioz and I have made sure to keep data short and sweet so my scouts don’t get overwhelmed with information they have to put in. I’m more confused how to teach them about Strategy and strategic thinking, I want to have a human robot match since we have finished building our game pieces but I want them to actively be thinking about match strategies at competition based on the data they’ve been collecting.
I also am trying to make the strategy team something they want to come back to and stick with full-time during off-season as well, any tips or suggestions are greatly appreciated!
I kind of understand what to do with scouting and alliance selection but strategy has always been hard to explain for me without it sounding super boring.
Once your data is collected, use some organization into important parts of the game. This year the ability to do amp and speaker are especially pertinent. So maybe make a some sections in your data collection with graphs or stats about robots, amount of game pieces scored, what individual roles are robots the best at (good amp, speaker, trap, defense robot ect.).
Then find a match, figure out what the robots are best at, try to come up with the best way for those robots to score the most points (making sure the amp robot scores enough amps so that the speaker robots score the most amped speaker shot cycles).
Then do this for every part of the match like auto: what auton does each robot have and what combo of auto’s scores the most points and leaves you in the best position going into teleop
teleop kind of explained above: what are each robots the best at, how can they interact during the match to score the most points (or rp in quals)
endgame: what are the capabilities of each robot in endgame (speed, ability, ect) what order should they climb in, are 2 robots small enough to fit on the same chain?, should a robot stay out and keep scoring instead of climbing because that will get more points?
think about this when making a picklist too, who works best with your robot and which set of robots works best our of available picks
How would you suggest I try and explain strategic thinking. I really want them to be able to talk to other teams with me, and be able to apply the data they’ve collected and see how it is affecting the team in real-time.
for strategic thinking Present them with an arbitrary problem, when one of them comes up with a solution for the problem ask them to go through the steps they used to get to the solution, then take those steps and apply them to the game. this should help contextualize the process.
as for real time interactions once there is some context you can take that data and put it into a problem and then try to solve it with the same process they came up with earlier.
Karthik Kanagasabapathy gives a standing-room-only presentation about strategy and scouting at worlds. Within FRC this is NOT a boring topic. Watch his video, invite your team to watch it. The 2023 version:
Strategy topic = me happy
Strategy can definitely be something really fun to do on the team. A good team without a good strategy will almost always be worse off than an okay team with a good strategy. One key thing we’ve done on my team (I was the Strategy Coordinator last year) was tie my department more into robot development, specifically revolving around design theory and robot priorities.
Rather than detailing everything here, take a look at a rundown of how we ran our Strategy Department last year, we also released our entire curriculum in the document. I hope it finds you some value, and let me know if you have any questions, always happy to help out!
Please share! What are you collecting, maybe we can help further refine or get you thinking to make everything super smooth for a good experience.