Both nights called the use of a SILVA style compass. Scouts love to wear a compass and they tend to develop an obsession on finding the magnetic North! It is important to build on this and find more uses of this basic tool.
For this we needed to de-construct the complexity of dealing with the map/grid/compass/hike by going out with a map and a compass and working both of them together and trying to deliver all that to lots of scouts at the same time.
So if you have found this direct approach difficult to deliver here is a new suggestion that will fit in your program as it is under 1h 30m each and it focuses only on parts of the whole use.
Night One (indoors). "Lydia's Adventure"
This can be found with a quick Google search under the challenge 100 website or the OSM.
Get challenge100.org.uk BrownseaAdventure here!
It is split in some PDFs a copy for scouts, a copy for the leader and some route cards ready to print and use!
It is basically a desktop, pen and paper exercise. We used Compass and Map to fill in a route card that follows the story of Lydia, a scout leader who went to Brownsea island and somehow got lost.
At this point the magnetic needle of the compass was ignored, we only used the direction of a travel, the index on the rotating disk and the distance/ruler part of the compass. Once our compass was oriented on the map's north we could test the bearings and distance finding the next point and the location of poor Lydia.
We learned about grid references, bearings and the importance of a route card. We discussed the importance of observation and of reading a map rather than looking at it.
Night Two (outdoors). A night walk out on the grid.
We used a compass and a notepad. We also used our scout stave and glow-sticks to aim ahead on our journey.
It would have been easier if we had a sighting compass but a normal compass worked ok too.
This was an exercise on the Grid alone, outdoors; we learned about pacing, bearings and taking notes.
The magnetic needle of the compass came into play; North was where it always is and we just needed to find where everything else lay around us. We only used the direction of travel, the index on the rotating disk but we wrote our pace on a notepad. We drew our own map!
A team of 3 scouts can split the roles to the one who stands as a target for the bearing taking, one who takes the bearing scoping the staff holder and one who paces the distance between the bearing taker and the target. Someone is also responsible on keeping the notes which are basically 3 columns:
e.g. on the notepad we wrote:
# Bearing Pace
1. 180 degrees, 50 paces
2. 270 degrees, 75 paces
3. 360 degrees, 20 paces (or just "N")
You can add a note of what you see and other data, time and even weather conditions. If you are confident, say you run this during the day, you can make it a race. The winner can be the one who walks the longest in the shortest time, the one who mapped the whole route more accurately fastest from start to finish or other ideas like that. We run the activity at night so we tried to stay together, give pointers and help figure out the method...
The outcome of this list can turn to a plotted route on paper or the map, all the legs of our hike took no more than an 1h on a dark cold night, enjoyed by all of our scouts.
Conclusion
We took the compass and we used it in simple ways without trying to do all the functions of the compass at once.
The first night we used the map with a compass but no need to read the needle.
The second night we used the compass with the needle again without setting the map (i.e. trying to read one).
This gave us a couple of test runs on how to tackle the map setting and map reading on the grid third and final challenge. Setting the map on the grid, the number 1 requirement to use both is now self evident to all our scouts. Taking accurate bearings, keeping a constant pace, tuning in the environment on the grid and by reading the map. It all clicks as it is previously experienced without making a fuss or a lesson out of all this.
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