**Background:**Some scouts like to create a plan of what merit badges they will complete as part of a specific rank requirement on TroopTrack instead of only applying merit badges to a rank after they’re totally with it.
This creates a problem where you can’t tell at a glance when looking at it on the Achievement tab > Ranks listing which of those badges are actually completed, and which ones are still in progress. You have to go the Merit Badge tab and check each one individually to see the status.
Proposed:
Add a visual indicator of the status of a badge (two states for a badge would be Incomplete/Complete). “Incomplete” is anything that is not 100% done.
Completed badges: should still display as they currently do- regular text, no italics or underline, etc. Bold for required badges, regular for electives.
Incomplete badges: make the merit badge name appear in_italics_. If you really want to be fancy, put the completion percentage next to the badge in parentheses, just like what you show for ranks on this same tab (and for merit badges in the Merit Badges tab).
In this example above, Citizenship in the Community" would appear like this on the list:
Citizenship in the Community (60%)
If Welding was incomplete, it would appear like this:
Welding (60%)
It’s not a big change, but rather another small timesaver. If we’re polling the database already for completion percentages when we draw the page, adding these completion statuses and percentages from the Merit Badges tab should be no extra effort except just adding the element to display the string.
Not necessarily- the percentage would only show for merit badges that are incomplete.
Incomplete badges would show in italics with a percentage next to them. Completed badges would not display any different than they are now.
The bolding/regular font weight would not change from what it looks like now.
@MatthewPodraza Yes, I agree with that idea and I’ve seen it in the community already. This is a distinct suggestion because the merit badges being separate has to do with the way the requirement calculation is processed when you view a rank; my suggestion has to do with the “at a glance view” without having to click into the rank to see the percentage an individual badge is towards completion.
My suggestion only applies to individual badges, not ranks.
Double enhancement - I like your suggestion as well as more granularity on the roll up of the progress.
I don’t want it to be a mystery of WHY I would want more granularity. Percentages seem arbitrary to track - BUT I’m a rather competitive. My style of competitiveness is translated to how I use some motivations in the Troop for the Scouts.
Scout A = 93% complete toward Rank… Scout B = 87% complete toward Rank.
I believe that competition in Patrols between Scouts and between Patrols fuels their drive to own advancement. They have another more granular point of pride.
Some Scouts do it for themselves, some are competitive, some do it because their parents make them… this would help the first two types of groups.
So if each requirement, including the MBs, breaks the Life rank into 12 requirements (#3 = 5 MBs) then each MB progress could be rolled up to the Rank percentage.
MB 1 = 100% = 8.3% of Rank progress
MB 2 = 50% = 4.15 of Rank Progress
Sorry, I think this is overkill. I’d like the programmers to spend their time improving existing tools to make it easier for the less-sophisticated user to manage the data.
Sometimes easy low hanging items can be easy successes. They won’t know we want to have a change unless we ask. If they ever get to a reporting redesign stage like the promised email updates - the devs have a better idea of features to add when they do tackle it.
