All Dens Update – Monday Jan 13

On Monday night the Cub Scouts participated in a “round-robin” style activity where they covered several topics and were able to learn about several people that made their mark in history including several inventors and what they invented along with getting to make scout-friendly versions of some of these inventions themselves:

• They learned how to build a catapult, like the great Archimedes who is credited with improving the power and accuracy of the catapult. The scouts did this using everyday supplies like popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and a spoon. This activity was a fun way to get the scouts engaged in engineering and physics as they utilize things like stored energy, gravity, and the laws of motion while exercising their cognitive and motor skills with easy problem solving and building something on a smaller scale.
• They then got to express their creativity by designing and building their own paper airplanes. Like the Wright Brothers before them, they were able to experience basic flight, see various flight patterns, and witness things like the Bernulli principle in action as their new creations took flight across the gym in some friendly competition for a coveted dinosaur.
• Lastly, they learned that science, engineering, and inventions reach everywhere as they received an introduction to the music arts and Christian Buschmann, the credited inventor of the harmonica. They combined these fields by building and playing their own harmonicas; where they even experimented and learned how different sized pieces led to different sounds.

The scouts had a lot of fun and it was exciting to hear the facts that they already knew about some of the people who paved the way for us; George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edision, and of course Lord Baden Powell the founder of scouting.

In the course of the evening, some of the dens were able to complete a few requirements for elective adventures. They were:

• Wolves – Air of the Wolf requirements 1a, 2b
• Bears – Baloo the Builder requirement 3b
• Webelos/Arrow of Light – Maestro requirement 2a