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How do I create a report to see what requirements are remaining for the scouts in a group of awards.
For example I want to see what scouts need hiking miles for an NOA award, I can only see percent complete or “started” not which requirements they have done.
@PeterSymonds - first of all full troop advancement is not in scoutbook plus so you need to be in scoutbook classic. Second on report builder you would need to check the box to show requirements
The awards do not auto-complete (in general). Some used to auto-complete for requirements that involved advancement completion (e.g. Earn XYZ merit badge), but there was not (and I think still is not) any tie between the logs and the awards or advancement requirements. Since things can be entered in the logs that may satisfy one requirement but not others, it would be very challenging programmatically to do this.
For example, National Outdoor Award for Hiking specifies that the hiking done must be “under the auspices of Scouting America” (https://www.scouting.org/programs/scouts-bsa/advancement-and-awards/noa/) whereas Hiking MB does not say the same thing for those hikes (https://www.scouting.org/merit-badges/hiking/). Theoretically, there could be an “under the auspices” flag added that can only be set by unit leadership. However, that would likely mean a proliferation of various flags to capture all of the “special case” requirements for each award (as they change over time).
For hiking we had not ever recorded items outside the auspices of scouting before; if someone was doing it for hiking merit badge outside a unit activity that was reported manually to the MB counselor, so all our recorded hiking would qualify.
I’m trying to evaluate our workflows for how/when we evaluate awards. We will just evaluate the logs periodically against the requirements for each award, since there’s no practical way to run a report for this.
I guess I view it as primarily the scouts’ responsibility to pursue the awards/advancement, if they are so inclined. I try to make our scouts aware of the opportunities, facilitate it for them, and, where feasible, I encourage them to actively track the awards/advancement themselves using the Comment feature for the respective requirements. If they can’t (e.g. don’t have their own Scoutbook login), I try to remember to log it there for them when we have an advancement review discussion.
To me, at least, that feels more like the kind of agency I had as a scout when my PLs, SPLs & SM/ASMs had me track for myself everything I was doing towards any given rank or award back in the “everything is written on dead trees” era. There were many times the question I got as a PL/ASPL of “I thought I already did that!” elicited the response “Well what does your notebook say?”. :^)
Say, for example, a scout marks the “10 unit activities other than troop meetings” requirement for First Class completed. It would be great for them to have recorded in their Scoutbook comments what they believe those activities are. We can then discuss what those activities were and cross-check it against our attendance lists, of necessary, before approving it.
It also helps with requirements that don’t permit “double counting” of a given activity for different requirements. We may not remember later which activity was “used up” for the “first” completion by the time the “second” one rolls around. However, the scout (and reviewing leader) can use those digital notes in the comments to back check that they aren’t collectively double-counting a single activity, when the requirements say that’s not permitted.
This will need to be a culture shift in our troop because the scouts do not generally have scoutbook logins (we are just initiating our shift to scoutbook now).
We are transitioning to actively using scoutbook for tracking advancement and activities. Until now they were expected to do all the agency on the advancement, and had to bring their books to us for recording, but did not have any paper way to track, see and log the awards.
Most of the scouts were unaware that they could, for example, earn the Paul Bunyan award because it’s not listed in their scouting guide book other than one line telling them to go look online for requirements.
We had generally used scoutmaster conferences as a chance to talk to them about awards they were pursuing and would mention ones they were close to achieving and review their progress.
I’m just getting up to speed on how the system works and how we might be able to use it to provide information to the Scouts. I frankly won’t have time to publicize every award and review for every scout, and we never did before, but I do appreciate being able to see in scoutbook which awards they are close on.