Annual camporees provide many good learning and social opportunities for both Scouts and their leaders. Scouts enjoy getting together with other Scouts and comparing their troop to others by watching them tackle various activities, checking out the different gadgets they make, and seeing how they apply their Scouting skills. Scouters can seek out new ideas pioneered by other troops and check out the different types of tents and equipment in use.
If you make the camporee program available to participating troops a couple of months in advance, the Scouts can use the time to train and practise to meet the various challenges. It's a good way to improve their Scouting skills.
This article provides a series of challenge activities that have been very successful at camporees over the years. Some of them sharpen pioneering and outdoor skills and some are just good fun. Get together with your patrol leaders so that they can review each activity and plan how best to go about it. Brainstorming is a good approach. Challenge the patrol leaders to find better and faster ways to perform the various projects with their Scouts.
Six Scout team; judged on time. Given a 10 metre rope, tie a clove hitch to a post in the middle of a 7 metre circle. You may not enter the circle.
At your Court of Honour, place a pencil in a block of wood and give the PLs a piece of string with which to work out the best method. Then have them try their solutions in full scale.
The Giant Knot might be a round turn and two half hitches. Or it might challenge Scouts to secure two 10 m ropes to the pole. Look up the fisherman's knot.
One Scout; judged on time. Throw a 10 m rope over a 2.5 m crossbar 5 m away. Run up and tie a timber hitch to a log (50 cm long). Hoist the log free of the ground and hitch the rope to a peg at your starting point. The log must remain clear of the ground.
10 Scout team; judged on time. Given no equipment, ring a bell hung 3.5 m above ground. You must ring the bell with your hand.
Six Scout team with a 3 m rope; judged on time. Teams are arranged three Scouts at each end of the course. The first Scout ties the rope to a log and pulls the log to the other end of the course to be pulled back by the second Scout, and so on. The timber hitch is a fast knot to tie but, if they make it a single, they must keep on the tension at all times.
Three Scout team; judged on the number of successful throws. Throw an 11 metre rope over a 9 m distance to land between two pegs set a metre apart. Each Scout has two throws.
Two Scout team with materials supplied by troop; judged on the time it takes to get a self-sustaining flame in kindling. Flint, glass, steel wool, etc., are permitted but no matches, lighters, or commercial scratch lighters. You need good tinder here. I remember a Scout who used the gauze padding from the cast on his leg!
Four Scout team with troop saw (two-man crosscut saws not permitted); judged on time taken to cut through a timber 15 cm x 15 cm.Two Scouts hold the timber, two Scouts use the saw. Scouts may change places.
Your PLs may benefit from a few tips:
put the two heaviest Scouts on the log to anchor it; don't try to cut through a knot; avoid pushing on the saw, which only makes it bind. Use a 75 cm saw so you can get good strokes, and put in a new blade. The troop saw probably needs one anyway.
Six Scout team; judged on time taken to tie knots correctly. In turn, each Scout runs 10 m, ties a knot, and returns to tag off the next Scout. The six knots are the reef, bowline, sheet bend, clove hitch, round turn and two half hitches, and sheep shank.
Two Scout team with wood and matches supplied by troop; judged on time it takes fire to burn through string. Stretch a wire 30 cm above ground and a string 45 cm above ground. The fire lay must be kept below the wire.
Four Scout team with compasses supplied by troop; judged on the number of correct readings in three minutes. Lay out a circle with about 20 numbered pegs around its perimeter. In turn, each Scout goes to the centre of the circle and is given a compass reading. He writes down the number of the peg in the direction he has been given.
Six Scout team; judged on accuracy. On a field, draw two lines 20 to 40 m apart to represent the banks of a river. Using various methods, Scouts estimate the distance between the lines.
Three Scout team; judged on accuracy. Use various methods to estimate the height of a pole.
Six Scout team; judged on accuracy. Scouts estimate the height of a hill. They may climb it to do so. What do your patrol leaders say about the best way to make the estimate?
Six Scout team; judged on time. There is a 5 m pole in a 10 m circle with one end of the pole touching the edge of the circle. You have two 30 m ropes. Without entering the circle, erect the pole in the centre of the circle.
Four Scout team; judged on time to complete correctly. Scouts are blindfolded and forbidden to talk. All four first tie a bowline on themselves, then numbers one and two Scouts tie together their ropes with a reef knot while numbers three and four do the same.
Four Scout team; judged on accuracy. Set up a three leg course that leaves a given peg on the baseline and returns to a different peg on the baseline.
Six Scout team; judged on time. Lash and erect a tripod from three poles 4.3 m long. Test by suspending a rope with a bosun's chair (bowline on a bight) from the top. One Scout must sit in the chair and remain clear of the ground. Can Race:
One Scout; judged on distance travelled in two minutes. Given two large juice cans, move from point A to point B without letting your feet touch the ground.
Two Scout team; judged on time. Scouts travel through a series of tires suspended at different levels from stout rope.
Two Scout team; judged on total distance travelled in three minutes. Supply stilts with step placed 45 cm off the ground.
Four Scout team; judged on number of accurate observations. You have a minute to view 25 items and three minutes to list them.
Four Scout team judged on time to complete. A bucket half full of water sits on top of a 30 cm high post. Two Scouts. using two staves as a stretcher, must move the bucket 15 m to the top of a post 120 cm high. The other two Scouts reverse the procedure. An upset bucket means game over!
Four Scout team; judged on the amount of water in the bucket after three minutes. Place a bucket 10 m away from a tub of water and give each team a small can with a hole drilled in the side near the bottom.Team members take turns to fill the can with water, race to the bucket to empty it, and return to give the can to the next Scout.
Six Scout team; judged on time and the amount of water remaining in the cup. Place three Scouts at each end of a 30 m course. Hand the first Scout a styrofoam cup full of water. The team runs a relay race carrying the cup of water over the course.
Four Scout team; judged on score. Give each Scout two chances to kick a soccer ball through a hulahoop standing vertically 10 m from the kick line.
Three Scout team; judged on score. Give each Scout two tries at throwing a tennis ball into an oil drum placed 9 m away from the throwing line.
It's obvious that the challenges offer troops ways to win points, but we consider all the Scouts at a camporee winners and do not declare a top troop. Instead, we make awards in three categories:
gold for the 10% of the troops who gained top points, silver for the next 10%, and bronze for all the others. We hand out the awards alphabetically, without announcing points. We think it's important that, instead of aiming to be "the best troop in the world", Scouts work towards making their troop the very best it can be.
Think about it, then go out there and involve your troop in a camporee this year.
The other game was one that we used last month for a small troop with several relatively young Scouts. Firebuilding was a new thing for them, and we wanted to see how well they'd caught on to techniques, etc. Rather than the old "first to burn through the string" type of contest, we juiced it up a bit and made it interesting for the older boys with the following twist: in addition to getting a fire going, each team should build a launcher to fire water balloons at the other team's fire. We didn't have a whole lot of time to let them work at the launchers, so for us, these were just overturned picnic tables with rubber slingshots strung between the picnic table legs. Old tire innertubes provided the rubber strips. One of our leaders brought some old tractor inner tubes from his family's farm, but I think a bicycle inner tube would have worked even better.
This game actually went rather well - the real objective of getting the Scouts to do some fire building was met (both teams' fires were easily built and kept going). We made up a couple of rules that helped keep some order in the chaos: the team fire had to be going before the team was allowed to launch a balloon; each team was only given two water balloons to fire at one time - they had to return the bits of broken balloon to get replacement balloons. (When we left the site where we did this game, there was no trace of any broken balloon bits whatsoever.)
A couple of hints though - we used a collapsible plastic water jug to fill the balloons - it was kind of tough to do and I fell behind the Scouts as they were firing - try to have as many as possible filled up before you start the game. Water pressure is something one tends to take for granted in the city, but at a campsite it can be a bit of challenge to get water balloons filled. Secondly, have a pretty good idea how your launcher will work; there are several designs around, if you have time to let the Scouts build them. With the rubber slingshot idea, rope that was tied through holes in the ends of the rubber tended to pull through the ends of the strips. We'll have a better design for next time though. :-)
One great story came out of the game - one team's balloon managed to land squarely in the middle of the other team's fire. But they'ld already discovered that half full balloons flew much better than full ones, so the darned water balloon didn't burst when it hit the fire! Better yet, even though flames were all around the balloon, the water inside kept it cool so that it didn't burst! Everybody ran up to see this silly water balloon in the middle of a roaring fire (very much the boiling water in the paper cup principle), when suddenly the top of the balloon popped and a little stream of water spurted out. The top even started to rotate a little - just like a miniature lawn sprinkler. There wasn't enough water to put out the fire, but it certainly made an impact and got a big cheer! After that, the game kind of degenerated into lobbing a few remaining water balloons around but it was a warm spring day and everybody had a lot of fun.