Logging Field Trips

Would it be possible to add a Field Trip Log to Scout Book? This would be a log to track scout activities that do not directly contribute to rank advancements (example: visiting museums, airports, factories etc. or participating in shooting sports).

Interesting request. How would this be used?

Hi Matt,

Thank you for the reply.

We frequently take our scouts on day trips like the Science Museum in LA, the Griffith Park Observatory, or even some local business that makes things the scouts might be interested in. We also take the scouts to Camp Three Falls for Shooting Sports Day as well as other outings that don’t involve camping, hiking or a service to the community.

We (actually I) would like some way to document these outings so they would show up in an outing log report but I don’t see a way to do it within Scout Book. Perhaps there is some capability in Scout Book I am unaware of as I am relatively new to it (I’ve been documenting our troop activities using Troop Master for over 20 years).

Any help here would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Chris Houlberg

B.S.A. Ventura County Council, Troop 119, Advancement Chairman and Webmaster (www.troop119.org)

B.S.A. Ventura County Council, Sespe District, Unit Commissioner

Hi, @ChristianHoulberg,

I agree that there isn’t a generic “unit event” log in Scoutbook. There are a couple of ways to address this. One is to use the attendance feature in Scoutbook’s calendar to log attendance at the event. That doesn’t log it anywhere else, but it does create a record that has been requested to be made available in some sort of exportable form.

One thing that we’ve done in our unit is to have scouts log all unit events that they want to count toward, for example, rank requirements for Second Class and First Class 1a, directly in that requirement’s Notes field. That way, the leader reviewing the Scout’s advancement can see which events the scout is counting, and assess whether or not those events meet the requirements. It’s not perfect, but I’d actually rather see the calendar module updated so that it operates on local time (rather than US Central time) and so that the attendance logs at events can be easily exported. That way, users can easily generate reports, etc from the attendance data taken at the events, and no separate logging is needed.

Charley,

Thanks for the information. I will look further into the Calendar Module to see what features it has. I hadn’t considered using the Calendar Module since we already have a convenient way of keeping everyone informed of our upcoming events by using a Google Calendar.

Chris

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