Patrol Projects in Week Long Format

[ideadoc]

Have any of you participated in a week long Wood Badge course? How did the patrol projects work? What was done to accommodate the shorter amount of time to prepare, and the lack of access to materials? Were materials provided? If so, what were they? Were there other aspects of the week long course that were a challenge to you, and if so what ideas do you have to improve the experience?

[OwntheNight]

 

 

Took my Woodbadge course last Summer out at Philmont, It was a week long course. Our project took place on Thursday after we hiked from Tent City to RMSC. We knew going to the "outdoor" portion of Woodbadge, that we would be presenting our project to the troop at that time. With that in mind, we knew we had to make our project mobile and easy to set up, with all patrol members carrying parts of the project in our packs.Nothing was done to accomodate us because of the shorter time to prepare. Our patrol figured out real quickly, after the first day, that we were in for a time crunch. We decided to use the "time management" technique. Go to cracker barrel, make a quick apperance, then head back to our classroom to work on our projects. Maybe, only 1 trip through the line at lunch, then back to the classroom for more project fun. We broke our projects up into 3 mini projects, since we were also designing our totem, and patrol flag at the same time. We had no lack of access to materials. The classrooms at Philmont are WiFi enabled now, somewhat slow though, but we could still get online for any info we needed to look up. Our council provided us a small library of scouting resources to use as we needed. As far as the challenges of a week long course, that's what made it so great. Our patrol had to NSFP in a hurry or we all were sunk. It really brought the 7 of us together and made us better friends for life and made us a great patrol for that week.

 

Always a Beaver

Ron

[Cubmaster Randy]

I also participated in a week long course.

As far as our as our patrol project went, after we came up with our idea and got it approved, we requested the items that we wanted from the QM.

The QM team got us what they could as far as the items we needed for the presentation. If they could not get us an item, we had to adjust

We did not have access to any electronics, so we made do with the resources that we had or could get.

 

We worked on it when we could, mostly in our free time (between taps and reveille when we were not writing our tickets)

 

In hind site, Having staffed a couple of courses since then, that were not week long, I can say all the patrols in our course did a great job, even in comparism to the patrols that were in the 2 weekend format. Although, We did not have the ability to do a formal takeaway that we could give out, the purpose of the patrol project was kept if not magnified

[BrentAllen]

I was on that course with Randy, and I agree - looking back, it is pretty amazing what some of the patrols came up with.

 

Our patrol didn't end up requesting anything from the QM (we probably weren't smart enough to do that), we just used what we had on hand. It definitely helps to have some creative minds in the group. In some ways, it is easier since you don't have the time or materials to worry about producing booklets or handouts - the projects were probably a little more focused. We saw everything from demonstrations to skits in our course.

 

Between taps and reveille - yep, that was about it - along with other things on the list. I think I averaged about 5 hours of sleep a night on that course, and loved every minute of it!