On the week of February 15, 2026, the Bobcat Robotics team held scouting tests to gauge club members’ understanding of the game’s material ahead of competitions.
When the year’s game, which largely centers around archeology, was released during Kickoff on January 10, 2026, all information pertaining to the game was released with it in the game’s manual. The manual was provided to all Robotics members participating in the event nationwide, giving students ample time to study before the scouting tests.
To further prepare the students for the test, the team held a series of scouting presentations the week prior to give team members an understanding of what was to be expected on the test.
The presentation discussed a lot of key game information such as aspects of the field and how alliance teams could earn points. Other topics were also touched upon, including fouls in game and different types of robots.
Along with that, a new component of the test this year was analyzing a previous year’s match. This was done in order to see what kind of qualitative data students could produce regarding a match ahead of an actual competition.
When the presentations concluded, and the next week of robotics began, students entered with a new understanding of this year’s game, ready for the scouting tests. These tests are especially important, for failure more than likely means that a student will be unable to attend competitions.
With this in mind, several Bobcat Robotics team members shared their opinions of the test.
“I think it’s a good test to make sure everybody knows the rules of our current game this year,” South Windsor High School senior Adhitya Shantharam said.
“I think it was challenging, but I think it’s necessary for our teams to do well during competitions,” senior Natalie Chin told The Prowl. “You need to study if you want to do well, but I think it’s worth it in the end.”
“It should be more in depth into the game rules, but I like the new aspect of actually scouting the old game,” junior Mahesh Chinthapalli commented. “That probably accounted for more skills than last year.”
Even though it may seem difficult, the importance of the scouting tests cannot be overstated, as the team needs good scouts to be able to learn about different robots at competitions so the team can develop strategies on how to play against them. This way, it becomes easier for the Bobcat Robotics team to lead another successful season, which makes all the stress of the test very much worth it.
