:3

How I learned to love the bomb

I spent the past couple days in Las Vegas for the FIRST Robotics Regional in Las Vegas. The itinerary is usually as follows: 

Day 0:

• Fly in
• Transport your robot and your pit materials to the arena

Day 1:

• Set up your pit (work 10x10 work space that your robot/tools/computers/everything that your robot needs)
• Fix things that were unable to be finished prior to build season ending
• Inspection By Referees 
• Practice matches that aren’t worth any points

Day 2:

• Introduction to judges (Steve Wozniak was one of our judges! He signed my laptop :D)
• Qualification matches
• Stress
• Scouting
• Minor Awards

Day 3:

• Qualification matches
• Alliance Selection
• Elimination tournament 
• Awards

But that part isn’t why i’m writing this. It’s a certain thing called scouting.

After you play your qualifications, if you are ranked high enough, you get selected to create an alliance, a group of three teams which will play as a single group against another group. Alliance selections are always intense and crazy. The trick to this is that you need to have an idea for who you’d like to have in your alliance for the best team for your regional. So teams do this thing called scouting, where they watch the games and fill out certain questionnaires.

Over the past couple years the system has evolved. before it was just a captain and some members that would constantly eyeball the field waiting for some team that did well. That involved into paper notes, which in turn evolved into whats called the paper method. These are like surveys which anyone on the team can fill out and not hinder the captain or other main members of the team so they can work on other things. 

The paper method usually is compiled into one large excel spreadsheet which can be sorted through easily. 

So this year, one of our members decided to use an webapp called cowscout (developed by team 1538 of san diego) for scouting. It allowed for a team to sign up, it had all regionals set up, it had all teams from there, you could see collective ratings of teams and it seemed like a good system.

I don’t like it.

Now i’m not saying that the system is bad, i’m saying that the method and implementation behind the system is bad. The web app by itself could probably be something really smart for a different environment. Unfortunetly, when you’re in a large metal building, with ~50*2 routers in the pit (two for each team, one for robot and one for drive station) + ~15 in the practice fields + ~30 that encase the entire venue, and the extra 20 that manage the field, you’re bound to get just a bit of overlap and interference. And even the wifi that is provided by the convention centerr, you have to pay, and it’s a huge daily fee that you would need to charge for 6+ computers. 

But wait there’s more. 

The system is apparently “intuitive and really easy” so I asked the coordinators behind the scouting for our team “If it’s intuitive, why are you having a meeting talking about how to use it” they’re response was “we have to train them” to which my response was “then it’s not intuitive!” Arguments arguments arguments and I just decided to say, alright, you’re going to fail spectacularly and i’m just going to sit here and love the bomb. 

Well I didn’t just sit there, I made my own scouting system. Being up for several hours the first night, I created a VBA macro for excel (side note, wtf visual basic if x = 4 is different from x = 4. jfhsjkfg). Of course, someone slipped and told them to which the coordinators freaked out and proved that they had backups which they showed (3 worksheet excel files with 20x20 grids to fill on each one). I told them..this is wrong, you’re making this far to complex. But I let them continue on their way.

I made my macro’d excel file with a really nice form based input so the scouters could easily input data and I was pretty happy with the result, and even if it didn’t work, then i’d have experience with VBA (not something that I would like to say that I have experience in but still). 

So the day of scouting comes, and accordingly, the bomb goes off. Wifi is far to expensive to buy for each person, phones of the scouters die due to lack of charge, computers die due to lack of charge, tethering from phones proved to be useless because the people tethering were to busy playing minecraft and screwing the connection, not to mention the data cap each of them had, but the best part of this all was the fact that NO ONE KNEW HOW TO USE IT. The system was far too complex, what point in the field are the shots coming from, where did they make it, what type of wheels do they have, are they swerve drive or west coast drive, meaningless information that is unnecessary. So the coordinators freak out.

What do they do?

They come to me, and ask for my macro’d spreadsheet. Everyone from the scouting team used it, and I replaced one persons job of scouting and they sat and watched me over my shoulder input data and they said “This is 800 times simpler than cowscout and is 200 times as effective. I can actually understand what’s going on”. 

Spoke to the scouting coordinators after and they said that everything broke and everything went wrong and that they hate scouting and that my predictions were true.

So what have we learned from this. 

Simplicity is key

Sometimes It is easier to let people fail spectacularly than convince them to accomplish successfully.