BIRDWATCH is a web tool designed to assist every aspect of FIRST Tech Challenge events before, during, and after an event. We provide official data from events alongside added features like score graphs, detailed data processing like OPR calculation, team photos and contact information, and even YouTube clips of different matches. Everything in a single and easy to navigate place.
Our goal is to assist all teams to rapidly assemble effective strategies and educated decisions using fresh event data displayed intuitively. Our main objective is to aid scouts, but we also hope that the information found on this website might be also beneficial to all student roles, mentors and coaches, sponsors, and in general any kind of person that’s passionate about FTC and would like to understand an event’s performance in full.
Our main source of information is FIRST Tech Challenge's official API, which includes several types of “files” related to an event/team. Any relevant data that is shown on the FTC events page is included. This is already quite useful to display a lot of information such as rankings, or specific information from a team like their region.
However, this alone is not enough. Based on those files, Birdwatch’s backend calculates data such as OPR and other info that makes Birdwatch’s data more detailed and easier to navigate.
Finally, information such as team’s social media, YouTube match clips, photos, and other information that is solid and does not require calculation gets updated manually by us.
The FTC events page does contain all relevant files for an FTC event. However, it does not include more advanced information such as OPR calculation. Thanks to FIRST’s API, we can expand upon their original page and give a much more specialized and complete service than what is just needed to run an event. On top of that, we’ve designed Birdwatch to resemble FTC events instead of taking complete inspiration from other sites like The Blue Alliance, so that it becomes easier for user who were used to just use FTC events to adapt to Birdwatch with its added pages. That’s why both sites share similar layouts and visual language.
Before developing Birdwatch, we used other websites, and we can say that these sites have been a tremendous help during our competitions and a must-have. Compared to the FTC Events page, these sites feel genuinely complete. However, we would often ask ourselves “but what if it did X thing?”. And so a lot of features came to our mind and suddenly we had the mission to create not just a website that feels complete, but go beyond that.
Since the beginning, we knew that just throwing magic numbers at a screen wouldn’t be enough. We thought that adding proper graphical aspects to make things more comprehensive would look like a tiny detail, but actually helps a lot. Basically, we also focus on the minor details that someone could overlook, but that we know improve the user experience.
We’re extremely thankful for our predecessors that inspired us to create our own tool. Thanks to them, scouting has progressed forward and we hope that we can carry on with that spirit.
Currently, Birdwatch only supports Into The Deep. Birdwatch will have a continued development to adapt to different seasons as they come. As for retroactively support past seasons, we're not sure yet. We'd rather dedicate our efforts to support current seaons instetead of already concluded ones. However, we understand the historical value of different events, including off-season events. So that means that for now, our current plans are focused on Decode (the next season) but if possible, we may also support past seasons and retroactively calculate data.