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I realize this is certain to be thrown in the “seems unlikely” pile, but I thought I’d suggest it anyway.
There are those tool tips/help points that appear throughout Scoutbook that pop-up a bit of useful information relative to a data entry point, etc. I feel it would be VERY useful to expand using those to also include Known Issues for a particular section or award.
This would help reduce the amount of time users (especially new users) might spend trying to use a broken feature (like Calendar Advancements in 2019, reports… etc.) or having to scroll through these forums researching or reporting already known issues.
Case in point: I’ve seen Ed A. point out numerous times to not attempt to use the Calendar Events Planned Advancements section in these forums. The CS requirements in the section are from prior to 2016, the feature doesn’t work as expected as the advancements aren’t marked off when Scouts attend. There should simply be a tool tip on the Planned Advancements section there – putting that information at the user’s fingertips and (hopefully) saving them from wasting time. Note that there already is a tool tip on the same Edit Event page for the section immediately above titled (ironically) Plan for Excellence – so this would be less of a coding request than a shift in usage.
Cub Scout planned advancements is up to date except for Lion. Development is working on that one.
An issue that prevented some Cub Scout Planned Advancement from loading in the calendar has been corrected. Cub Scout Planned Advancement for all ranks except Lion should now work as expected. Lion Planned Advancement is coming soon.
Keep in mind I referenced the tool tip usage as an example of how it could be used to keep a user more in tune with bugs/functionality… and you proved my point, William! The note you left me could be put into the tool tip!
Regarding the functionality if Planned Advancement: I respectfully disagree. I would argue that the expected functionality would have the attendees’ advancements/award records updated directly. I’ve read that was the intended functionality with this tool from even before BSA bought it from the original team.
The planned advancement feature of the calendar was never designed to update rank requirements based on attendance. The reason why is because Scouts sometimes arrive late, leave early, some requirements take more than one meeting / activity to complete, or individual Scouts do not complete a particular requirement for some other reason (attendance does not always = completion).
Jennifer, I’ve seen you state this about Scouts arriving late/more than one meeting/etc. multiple times, and I have to say, I don’t believe it’s something that would be impossible for a decent user interface combined with a proper database query to resolve. Seems like a relatively minor thing to be concerned with versus the amount of time it would save. I’ve read other tools out there have similar functionality. It’s definitely something I’d rather have in place for the majority, at the cost of needing to correct a handful of Scouts individually after the fact. I mean, I’d prefer if a decent UI was implemented to give me the ability to uncheck certain Scouts that attended, or group attendees by rank before I applied it. Wouldn’t need to be 100% automatic as your response implies. Just help us get the attendees to a Quick Entry page for the reqs that are logged. There are also a number of events (Summertime Activity Pin, etc.) where all it takes is to show up. I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with this at least as a concept… as I believe this is you saying as much in a post dated 4 years ago: https://www.scoutbook.com/mobile/forums/new-feature-requests/564/events---calandar--/?Page=87 near the bottom of the page.
I also have to contradict your assertion above that calendar events were “never designed to” update the Scout reqs (although you specified rank requirements). This functionality has been discussed for five years (as I stated in the post you replied to: from before BSA bought it) and several iterations & pieces of it have been in place at times–including feeding event planned advancements to the Scout’s records pages for planning (as happens now). The history on these pages linked below speaks for itself, specifically (the post from info@scoutbook.com) that says “we are working on it” : https://www.scoutbook.com/mobile/forums/new-feature-requests/564/events---calandar--/?Page=17
Using Scoutbook Calendars (SB) - Scoutbook Knowledge Base I only include this one because it shows the code does exist for items on the planned advancement list for an event to update the Scout’s records today by putting the planned item note there.
The most promising idea I recall was that an event could process a group of attendee Scouts (grouped by rank when necessary) to a Quick Entry page for the advancements/awards planned. I believe it was called “Planned Advancement Multi-Scout Quick Entry” as referenced here on Bob Scott’s Blog: https://www.scoutbook.com/mobile/blog/32/calendar-and-events-closed-beta-announced/?Search=&Page=7
Regardless, this was a tangent to my proposed feature request which was to do something to move some of the current status notes to where a user is most likely to want to have them: right where they’re relevant in a tool tip. I’m guessing I’m not the only one who can’t keep up with what gets implemented and what doesn’t especially when BSA won’t share issues logs. Making this platform a little more user friendly, especially for new users, should be the goal, right? Having a note on the screen I’m on tell me “we know this thing you’re trying to use is broken/doesn’t, we’re working on it” or “it doesn’t do X, but it does do Y” is instantly relatable and worthy of some priority where I sit.
Relevant to Calendar Planned Advancements, it would be good to put a tool tip in there to at least tell people what the BSA’s current plan is for how that will be used (e.g. “this isn’t going to update records, but it does make events where planned advancements show up on a Scout’s page for that advancement/award.”)
My experience has been that the majority is actually the scouts who either arrive a little late or leave a little early, rather than the other way around.
While I’d like to have the situation you imply in which most of my scouts are there at the very beginning, stay to the very end, and make it to everything that was planned, that’s just not consistent with what I’ve seen, even when I was a DL/ACM. If nothing else, the scouts aren’t in control of their own transportation and they arrive/depart when their parents deliver/collect them. Often, the DL or PLC plan more to do than fits in the meeting. If credit occurs as soon as attendance is taken, and something doesn’t get completed, every scout who attended has to have that requirement cleared. If an individual scout had already completed things, whomever is going through clearing out the “incorrect” completion dates has to be sure not to clear the correct one. It’s just not clear how much time is actually saved with “automatic crediting”, given how simple the Quick Entry (QE) tools are to use.
If you have to check/uncheck/sort/confirm the scouts anyway as part of a semi-automatic system, it seems like QE is the way to go rather than implementing a new feature to pre-select the advancement based on planned advancement. I’m not even sure that it’s “Dilbert easy” to implement what you’re describing there.
This suggestion, though, might have some legs. I can see that being able to auto-create a set of scouts marked as attending an event and “load” it into the QE interface could be useful. I’m not sure how hard it would be to code the linkage between whatever structure is used to store the attendance and whatever structure is used to store the data for the QE interface before it’s committed to the database, but that certainly seems more do-able. I’m not sure the extra coding to pre-populate the planned advancement into the QE interface would be useful, especially given that the QE interface is separated for things like rank requirements, merit badges, awards, hiking, camping, service, etc. I’m not sure how this would work with the current interface if more than one “type of requirement” (e.g. rank + service + camping) was completed at an given event. To do it all at once seems like it would require a rewrite of the QE interface. To do it without modifying the UI seems like it would require firing the QE interface once for each type of requirement at the event.
Any thoughts from SUAC as to whether this more limited approach (creating a pre-loaded list of scouts for Quck Entry based on the attendance at an event) would be feasible, based on what y’all know from talking to the devs?
Of course, that begs the question of how many people are actually using the attendance feature? We hadn’t bothered with it in my son’s troop until the Scouting app was updated to let youth leaders take attendance.
I think a large part of why it’s not getting used is that it doesn’t really do anything more useful than taking attendance on a piece of paper as yet. If it had functional utility, such as speeding up creating of a quick entry list, it might get more mileage. At least that’s my perspective on it.
tool tips/help points that appear throughout Scoutbook that pop-up a bit of useful information relative to a data entry point, etc. I feel it would be VERY useful to expand using those to also include Known Issues for a particular section or award.
