Training Log Archive: barb

Still feeling happy about yesterday's event. So grateful to Ian F for bringing all those scout families! I overheard one father saying to Ian that if he had known how fun it was, he would have brought his other kid.

Dave, Ethan and I talked over dinner about all the positives, and also how to make it better.

Dave suggested having a little card with a checklist, so that any staff member can instantly see what the participant has done, and guide them to what they need to do next. I was doing that on the fly by asking what they had just done, and often parents or kids would come and ask for what they needed next, but a checklist would be nice because it would give everyone more clarity.

I'd like to have pre-registration online, complete with waiver. Then we can have a packet waiting for those folks and they can skip the registration line and go right to the activities.

Processing finishers is intense because the activities are so short (which is appropriate given the age of the kids - they go out and do short exercises and check back in frequently). It would be good to have two different finish tables, one for animal-O and one for everything else. As it was many people skipped downloading and just went out again on another course, because the download line was too long. We could have had more people at download: you download quickly and then get shuttled off to a results interpreter to talk about how you did. If you don't need an interpreter than you go right out again.

Giovanni's system was a huge help.

Because map reading is easier at a park, I chose to emphasize map reading by having multiple controls in an area, and you had to read the map carefully to get the correct control.

Home from the Navigation Games event.

Huge turnout - at least 60 people. Around 30 of them were Ian Finlayson's scouts from Arlington, along with their siblings and parents.

We aimed at having things for younger kids, including animal string-O.

Kids did come back multiple times for different micro maps and animal sequences, so they were doing it. Lots of kids did the maze-O, which was larger (9x9) than I've put out in the past. There were two sprints and a poison score-O, all of which were pretty much the same controls - but in order to force people to read the map, we put out pairs of controls at 8 locations, and you had to be sure you punched the correct one.

We used Giovanni's e-ink display, which was great, and now we have all the results on his tablet, which is also pretty key.

We had a lot of helpers. I gave instructions and managed the animal-O and micro-O. Dave started people on the maze-O, poison score-O and sprints. Ethan handled finishes. Alex stood at the start for 2 hours doing Clear and Check and starting kids. Jeff did results for the poison score-O. Brian and Leah did registration. Ian handled registration, epunches and compasses for the scouts, and gave instructions to the older ones. Isabel and Keegan helped set up. Lots of the above mentioned helped with taking everything down. We would have really been hurting without any one of those people.

There were many kids and families doing orienteering for the first time.