Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Robotics Merit Badge





Recently, I helped teach the Robotics Merit Badge.  In helping, I talked about my experience in the FLL, or First Lego League. In addition, I also showed several young scouts the basics of programming in the Mindstorm language. I showed them a program I had created to count steps on a fit bit. The scouts then went and created their own robots and then I was able to help them program them.  All in all, I'd say it was a very successful merit badge.

NYLT

NYLT, or National Youth Leadership Training, is a youth leadership program for scouts.  In order to become an eagle scout, you need to go through it. It focuses on how to teach, and how to lead.  I was fortunate enough to be able to go at K-M (pronounced: kay bar em) this summer. For more information, you can visit https://www.scouting.org/scoutsource/BoyScouts/Resources/nylt.aspx

At NYLT, I learned a whole bunch. Generally, you want to be calm, so people feel that you're approachable. At one point we, we being the collective camp, got in trouble because some unnamed, found out person decided to draw some vulgar images on the brand new bathrooms. Elliot, the lead scout person there, when the head leader Kim announced the bathroom scenario, stood there with his arms crossed. He later used that as a teaching moment to say that he wasn't really angry, more just disappointed.  So body language and vocal pitch play a part of how much of a leader you are,  because if you're acting as if your best friend just kicked your new puppy, then people aren't going to want to tell you about problems,  which in  turn means that you might not know about it until the whole machine stops because of that.