The Weekette Logo

The Weekette
Activity Help

Scouting professionals say: "(The Weekette has) ...things down. They are a well-oiled machine."

The Weekette / Help / Activity Help

Activity Help

Introduction

Winter Camp has as long history of strange activities. In the early years of planning, we would hold marathon brainstorming sessions at the planning meeting which resulted in a lot of strange ideas. We keep them on the list just so we don't have them proposed every year.

A few years ago, the activities database got an update to store more info about each activity as it was suggested, partly to discourage truly goofy activities and partly because we sometimes had an idea and forgot what it meant later when it seemed like it might be fun to try.

The advent of the website and the progress made in personal computers made databases a reality and now Winter Camp has a database of over 1,000 ideas, about 250 of which we've actually used.

Activity Name

Pretty straightforward -- this is the name of the activity. Choosing a cool name can help and you can't duplicate an esisting activity.
Names should capitalize each word so "New Activity" not "new activity". Stuff with numbers and words should by hyphenated if the number is the number of the nxt word. So "3-Way" is right, not "3 Way" or "3way".

Example: Quidditch

Describe the Activity

In this one, you're just providing a short description. Not the rules, just sort of a brief description of what we'd do.

Example: This is a terrestial version of Quidditch where players put multipble balls though the goal to earn points.

Duration

Typical duration of the activity. This should include transport time and a few minutes to recover befor the next activity

Skills Emphasized

This identifies which skills one needs to do well at this event. Part of this is an attempt to balance things so there are chances for everyone to shine. Some events will have multiple skills.

Physical
The activity is physically demanding. Usually applies to hikes, sports, and anything where being bigger, stronger, nimble or faster might give you an advantage.
Mental
This is really about brainpower and knowledge. If you do well in school, this is probably where you'll excel.
Social
These activities are related to people-skills.
Creative
These activities call on people to be creative. Artistic or musical people usally do well at these.

Category

Category is an attempt to group things together. Part of it is another attempt to make sure we have a variety of activities at camp.

Activity
This is the default category; if we don't have another one, we use this.
Admin
This is something that isn't exactly an activity, but does take some time. The biggest example is probbly the Trading Post.
Banned
Either the Council, the Guide to Safe Scouting, or past experience make this something we wouldn't do again.
Ceremony
This is for actual ceremonies, from the Brotherhood to speical ceremonies of our own.
Challenge
This is intended to challenge people to accomplish something.
Creative
This is for any artistic endeavor from art to writing.
Game
Usually this is either a giant version of a boardgame or things we play indoors.
Hike
A trek through camp which may include other activities or rules besides.
Ill-Conceived
Activities which were likely suggested to avoid a strike in the old round-robin style meeting or which are just not preactical.
Kitchen
This is an activity which is primarily aimed at making or eating food.
Learning
Trainng of all sorts
Movie Watching
Watching a movie of some sort.
Multistation
This is the prototypical event where participants travel between challenges or activity sites.
Scout
This is at least based on a traditional Scout activity.
Shadow
These are shadow activities for meals with strong program components. Shadow activities don't appear on the normal list. They are used to create an Hazard Mitigation Report for meals that border on activities.
Social
This is mostly an event where we hang out or perhaps try to convomce others to do something.
Sport
This is at least based on a traditional Sport but usually involves a change to upscale the rules.
Unifying
These are the most important events at Winter Camp; like the joining knot, these are things every camper has done.

Degree of Difficulty

This is a shorthand for how hard we think it will be to pull this activity off and how hard it will be to participate; we try not to have a bunch of really hard things on the same day.

Preferred Location

The location describes where the event is most likely to take place. Combined means there are indoor and outdoor components.

Time

Some things have to happen at night and some during the day.

Participation

Individual means each person is on their own (common for boardgames and creative endeavors, Team means just that and typically includea a competitive element, and Group means we all do it together.

Equipment Requirements:

This is just a ballpark for how much gear we'd need.

Why would this be fun?

The idea is to provide a reason people might enjoy this activity. It's probably the least importan question, since predicting fun is difficult.

Example: Quidditch is an interesting sporting event from the Harry Potter world and one where the rules are easy to find online.

What are the basic rules?

Explain the process of the activity.

Example: Everyone had to keep their broom between their legs. There is a neutral person who is the snitch and runs around with the ball. There is one scoring boal and each team has a goal. The rest of it is somewhat like dodgeball.

Are there any variations we should consider?

Someimes we could play this game another way or with slightly different rules.

Example: There are a few board and card game versions of this activity.

What special equipment will we need?:

List gear we need to pull this off.

Example: Broomsticks for everyone, a ball in a sock for the snitch, three balls for the blodgers, a larger boal for the quaffle, and two hula hoops as goals.