Further thoughts.
I think this comes down partly to a philosophical discussion about how badgework is tracked and entered. The options I see are updating each Cub individually or updating them as a group.
For us, we update as a group. Our workflow is something like:
- record attendance
- if everybody met a requirement we bulk update for all 3 Boomerang levels
- if we split into different levels then we’ll update the kids according to how they were grouped
For us, this is a quick and painless method of keeping the records up to date - I can do it at home after the meeting in 5 mins. It assumes that everyone who was there on the night met all the requirements for the things we’re ticking off. Kids end up with stuff “done” for Boomerang levels they aren’t going for - we randomly go along and delete these achievements every so often (eg a Bronze Boomerang Cub might have 5% of their Gold Boomerang done - we then go and delete the Gold Boomerang achievement from the Bronze Boomerang Cub every term or when they get another badge).
For this approach it would be best if each different requirement in the Boomerang was given it’s own tracking. That way if we teach a Bowline to the Gold Boomerang Cubs we can mark it off. The next week we might do a sheetbend. And the week after a Clove Hitch. If someone misses the second week the system would show they have done Bowline and Clove hitch but not Sheetbend.
For this approach we cannot keep track of where Cubs are up to in the “notes” section because we’re not looking at individual Cub records.
In fact this approach won’t work at all the way TroopTrack currently does Boomerang tracking because it groups too many things in together.
The alternative would be to go into each Cub and use the Notes field for each more general requirement to note the sub parts they have completed. Once they have done all the sub parts then you can tick the box.
It seems to me that this would be a lot more time consuming - I would need to go into up to 24 different Cub details, click on the achievement tab, edit the appropriate Boomerang award, find the notes field for what we did, work out if they have now completed all the requirements for that section (comparing the notes from before, what they did tonight and the requirements).
I just don’t see option 2 happening for us - our three leaders struggle to run the pack as things are. Troop Track doesn’t seem set up for it either. If I look at the event details I can see who has attended but I can’t click on their names. So I’d have to have that list open in one window while searching manually for each Cub in another. That process would have to take at least 1 minute per Cub or 25mins in total.
Troop Track seems to be more set up for the first approach - there is a “record awards progress for attendees” button on the details for the event. This button is mostly useless in the second approach where the notes field is used to track which sub-parts are completed since it updates in bulk.
As a side note, to make things easier to track we also use the “suffix” field of the Cub name to include their Boomerang level and month/year date of birth. So they show up as “Fred Nurk [B] 03/08”. The Boomerang level helps when entering achievements (easy to see who was in each group) and when analyzing award progress (making it easy to ignore the Cubs who aren’t actually going for a Boomerang level but have done some of the requirements anyway). The month/year DOB is discussed here - Manage->Sections - show age to one decimal point