The discussion about Blue Cards touched on record keeping. I think the Blue Cards are a fine way of tracking indoor progress, though maybe not as good as they used to be. Kids used to collect baseball cards, so they had some ability to keep track of rectangular pieces of cardboard... Not sure they come into Scouting with that skillset as often these days.

Anyway, the big problem I've seen with Blue Cards is weather-related. Our troop likes to do as much outdoor learning as possible, but while Blue Cards fit nicely in the cargo pockets of scout pants, they don't survive a good downpour very well. After one MB Weekend, we had a lot of scouts with piles of blue pulp in their pockets. As a MBC, the only reason my copies of the cards were okay is that I put them with the teaching materials I put in my truck after the last session (before the rain came).

Scout handbooks have a similar problem. When scouts bring the on campouts, they get pretty badly beatup. We're established enough now that scouts are getting most of their advancement signed off by their PLs and SPLs, but I still get the occasional request, and often the advancement record in the back is a collection of pages held together by a strand and a half of glue, with signatures and dates of blotted ink that has run and become illegible. Nearly every time I see the handbook of a scout who's been with us more than a couple of months, I find myself suggesting he take a picture of the advancement pages every time he gets something signed off.

Bottom line, I like the idea of scouts learning to be responsible for their own record keeping, but can we give them some more durable tools to do it?