The Badge Archive

We had limited time in November and are struggling to juggle all the projects we’re working on. Where do you think our priority should be? Give us a comment to help us decide!

Our current main project is making sure each badge has booklet info on Scout’s Honor Wiki and getting a Summary of the requirements for The Badge Archive.

• We could just get the booklet info on first and then go back and do summaries instead of trying to do both at the same time.

The biggest side projects are compiling activity lists. We currently started one for Daisy Petals, Outdoor Art for all levels, Cookie Business badges, and Financial Literacy badges.

• Outdoor Art is relatively easy to finish. We did an activity list for all ages and need to go back and re-organize it. The activities need to be grouped by general recommended age categories as right now you have kindergarten crafts along with high school level ones.
• Petal Project is already at least halfway completed. We have an activity list of currently known activities. We have a basic meeting plan for all levels. We’d love to add some more activities to the petals that don’t have a lot. We need to take the general outline of Brownie/Daisy badge combos and flesh it out a little more and make the combo meeting plans for the rest of them.
• Cookie Business badges have been organized by which levels do similar tasks, but the activities to accomplish each tasks need to be compiled. We have no list of activities made yet and need to go through all the old cookie plans and the new booklets and make the list and then categorize it.
• Financial Literacy will a lot more organizing. We’ve started to organize what levels do which, and started to compile the activities. Then we realized a lot of activities are repeated for each level and we need to do a group activity list for all levels like we did for Cookie Business. Problem is there is far more requirements than just 4 main ones like Cookie Business. Organizing it to be easy to navigate may be tricky. It need to be usable by single level troops as well as multi-level.

The last two projects we’ve picked up a time or two but aren’t sure if it’s worth tackling.

• Cybersecurity would be a general redesign of all badges so each meeting would have a hands on activity (game or craft) to facilitate learning and meeting the GSUSA requirements. We kind of want to do a meeting per badge (which is budget friendly).
  • We’d also like to do one meeting for all three for each level since really, you only need one meeting per level to learn all they want in the three cybersecurity badges. And most troops would be really bored of the topic after three lessons (we figure if we do three lessons troops could just pick their favorite one and do one a year). But if you do all three, that’s $10.50 for badges for a single troop meeting and to us, that’s not really cost effective. It’s still a great way to earn the badge – we recently saw a 4 station rotation for the Brownie badge a leader made that was really awesome. It’s just hard to swallow the cost of badges for some troops.
• Coding for Good we’ve already done some basic plans for “unplugged” versions – ones where you can earn them without needing a computer lab. They were designed to just learn the concepts of coding, but not do actual coding.
  • We’d also love to put together one where you can lead your troop in a computer lab to do actual coding. Most scouts we know have wanted to do these badges to learn a little code and that only happens if you can find a facility with a computer lab and know what tutorials to try out with them depending on their level.