Scouting & StrategyModule 6 of 8

Common Mistakes & Troubleshooting

The failure modes that quietly sink scouting operations, and the debugging workflows that fix them. You will learn to diagnose and prevent mislabeled and missing data, measure and improve scout accuracy, recognize when OPR/EPA mislead you (defense, small samples, blowouts), keep the data pipeline alive when wifi and batteries fail at a venue, and avoid the human and analytical traps that turn good data into bad picks. Grounded in real REEFSCAPE scenarios and tools teams actually use.

Common Mistakes & Troubleshooting is module 6 of 8 in the Scouting & Strategy guide. It picks up where Worked Examples & Mini-Projects left off and hands over to Advanced Techniques & Case Studies. Its 5 lessons are about 215 minutes of the guide's ~21 hours.

5 lessons~215 min32 lessons in this guide

Start with lesson 1 All of Scouting & Strategy

In this module

5 lessons

01Bad Data at the Source: Mislabeled, Missing, and MiscountedThe three data-entry failures that corrupt everything downstream, and the form and process fixes that stop them.45 min read

02Measuring and Improving Scout AccuracyTreat scouts as instruments you calibrate: measure per-scout error against ground truth and use weighting and training to raise data quality.45 min read

03When OPR and EPA Mislead YouPublic analytics are powerful but have well-known failure modes; learn to recognize defense distortion, small samples, blowouts, and shared-task confounds.45 min read

04Pipeline Failures at the Venue: Wifi, Batteries, and SyncThe infrastructure problems that strike on match day and the offline-first design and field kit that keep data flowing.40 min read

05Human and Analytical Traps in Strategy DecisionsEven with clean data, cognitive biases and bad analytical habits sink picklists and match plans; here is how to debug your own decision-making.40 min read

Previous moduleWorked Examples & Mini-Projects

Next moduleAdvanced Techniques & Case Studies

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Longer reads

Articles that go deeper on this

FRC Scouting Guide: How to Scout and Build a PicklistLearn how FRC scouting works, what OPR and EPA actually measure, and how to turn match data into a ranked picklist for alliance selection.4 min read

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