Meet team 2265’s pit scouting sheet! This is our first year doing any of our pit scouting on paper, but I designed this because I felt so rude standing in front of teams doing their pit scouting on my phone. That said, making something even vaguely comprehensible on paper creates a unique challenge. A few days before designing this sheet with the team’s strategy head, I was a ref at an FLL event and I thought the paper scoring sheet was a really good model of how to execute something like this. Using that as a base, I generated a list of things I thought we’d want to know from teams, including one thing I just personally want to know, and separated them into categories on the sheet.
Given we’re just people and I was editing this design until right before posting it, there’s a chance I missed something. I’d love feedback and suggestions.
For auton, I think it can be evaluated more. A good question to ask is if a team has more than 1 auto (and if they do, what is their primary one). Another good auto question is where does the robot end up at the end of autonomous. Its good to have more precise questions rather than vague ones if you are looking for an autonomous that has chemistry with yours (or has the potential to).
The Scout’s Eyes Only section is somewhat TOXIC, but overall, it seems like a pretty good scouting report. I think you should probably add some more questions to the section regarding Autonomous and Shooter, though.
While it may be somewhat toxic, i do agree with at least noting how the people were. I’ve had a scout consult me because the person from another team was not being nice to my scout. So i asked the same question my scout had already asked, and got the same response. It was rude, contained annoyance and there was minimum if any eye contact was involved.
At this point my usage of ‘TOXIC’ is becoming a running joke, but I do think that it is a bit weird to write that down on your scouting paper. It is somewhat of an unfair reflection of the entire team, and if the person is rude enough, you should probably talk to your team about it in person instead of marking it down on the form.
Exactly! If a team isn’t GP towards our scouts, that’s something we want to know for when we have to ally with them in the future, or even considering a picklist. A team that’s pleasant to work with is a team we want working with us in the future.
Yep! There’s already teams who note how Qualification alliance partners perform with them and can get on the DNP list because of that. There’s no reason to not take into account for how scouts are treated- They’re humans too!
I agree not to let one bad apple ruin the bunch, but I think the GP question can also extend beyond the individual interviewed by the scout to a few observations of the culture of their team or the vibe in their pit. Whether there’s mutual respect within the team itself can also indicate how well they’ll work with other teams.
Also, if the scout just happened to get a bad team member and were wrongfully marked as rude or not GP, further interactions doing pre-match strategy will remedy that before the time comes for alliance selection.
I’m posting an update shortly to include a few changes, such as (1) changing a lot of questions not to indicate capability but to indicate comfort, and (2) making the autonomous section more extensive
