Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
Why is it so complicated to enter the Camping, Hiking and Service hours now for Cub Scouts?
I was able to do this so easily until they changed it and Cub Scout’s parents could as well. Now it has to go into Internet Advancement? Seems backwards for the younger kids in the scouting program and more work for the leader.
We were planning to have a friendly Hiking Mileage Contest (with Pizza and Prize Ribbons) in our pack for next year because it used to be so simple to enter and track - now its so much more complicated for all of the adults to track.
Is there another way to track this in scoutbook that would help encourage the parents to track the non-den hikes they take?
Why the change in the way camping nights, service hours, and hiking miles are recorded? It was quite frustrating, and I had to add an event in Internet Advancement for my Scout’s service hours. Most parents are not well versed in IA, so this seems like a way to make things more difficult and not easier. Now, I am essentially taken out of Scoutbook into IA to view any of my Scouts’ (I have 4 in my family, in 2 different units) activity, but can view everything else (advancement, leadership, training) in SB. This frankly doesn’t make sense. Can you please explain the reasoning for this change, and also how to make it easy to track/add/view my Scouts’ camping/service/hiking.
Thanks.
Michael Woolery
I completely agree - I’ve been at this for 14 years and the Scoutbook advancement entry seemed like a move in the right direction. So much more user friendly. This has been a total step backwards! At least at the Cib level where we desperately need to make things easy and app based for today’s younger busy families.
My guess is that BSA is trying to make one application work for more than one program. Also there are at least two level of data requirements:
a. individual advancement
b. unit service for Journey to Excellence reporting
I believe that Bill is correct. It has been moved to Internet Advancement for Journey to Excellence tracking. However, I agree with all of you that it should be left in Scoutbook, then have the ability to upload it into IA.
I asked the same question in a different way a few months back and the response was, “the software used in Scoutbook was old and the code needed to be written to fit IA.” So how does this benefit, the Scouter on the ground who wants to update camping nights, service hours, or hiking miles, or for the software engineers, or others? Microsoft buys companies that create innovative products and then don’t always make the product as useful as originally designed. It’s happening to BSA and Scoutbook. It’s the end users that have to struggle with ‘upgrades’ that are designed to make our work easier.
