What happened at the last meeting (Jan 14)?

• Wind Tunnel experiments with airfoil, toy cars, and toy mammoth.
• New explorer sign-ups
• Explorers to browse the Post 747 website and share what Careers and Activities interest them.
• Download Meeting Agenda

Meeting Recordings

Pictures

As a Youth under 18 years old, how do I join Club 707 or Post 747?

As an Adult 18 years or older how do I join Club 707 or Post 747?

How are Explorer Club 707 and Post 747 related to Scouting?

Exploring is run by Learning For Life, and is an affiliate (not subsidiary) to Scouting America. Exploring focuses on career exploration and does not use the Scout Promise, Scout Law, uniforms or insignia of traditional Scouting. There is some administrative overlap, as you might experience when signing up for Club 707 or Post 747. If you are already a member of Scouting America, some of your membership paperwork can be reused in your application for Exploring.

How do we come up with activities for the Explorers?

1. Exploring has made it clear that they think for a Post/Club to work well activities must be hands-on for a majority of of what the Explorers do and tours and talks are kept to a minimum. This is easier said than done, but we have some ideas.
2. We gamify everything we can within reason. Turning things into a game is not as hard as it sounds. Much has already been done for us. Board and card games are excellent examples of that. For other tasks we just add a time element to the activity like was done by EAA in the Cleco practice game. At first glance it sounds silly and stupid to do that with boring mundane temporary rivets, but it works. We have tested it at EAA Young Eagles events and it is a hit. For other activities we remove the time stress element. We have found that coloring pages is a popular activity that can be enhanced to impart a lot of knowledge. Providing coloring pages of more complicated drawings with aviation themes and some technical content allows a slower absorption of the knowledge in a calming and focused manner.
3. Steal the best ideas from the organizations that have much bigger budgets. We are scouring the websites of national Scouting, Exploring, EAA, AOPA, NASA, FAA, and many other organizations for the very best ideas. Yes, a lot of what is out there is rather boring and useless, but there are gems, and we are mining for the very best we can find and bringing it back to the Post/Club adults to find the supplies needed, refine and test the activity before we offer it to the Explorers.
4. Delay using software until physical and paper based activities are exhausted or cannot do the task. Hands on is rather opposite from using software. There are some learning areas where using software is a must, but if we can delay or even avoid using it, we will. There will be plenty other software experiences for the Explorers.
5. Listen to some of the best psychologists and medical doctors. Dr. Marty Lobdel's teaching on the methods or learning has been very helpful in coming up with effective gamification ideas. Dr. Daniel J Siegel and others work on explaining teen brain development allows us to be more effective in guiding our Explorers through this difficult phase of life.