ASME helps Boy Scouts redesign their engineering merit badge

Henry Baumgartner
ASME NEWS

For a Boy Scout, the road to glory consists of accumulating as large a collection of merit badges as possible. The badges, which reward accomplishment in a wide variety of fields from sculpture to cooking, also represent valuable educational experiences.

One of these, the merit badge in engineering, has just been revised in a cooperative effort by the Boy Scouts of America and ASME, through its Board on Pre-College Education (BPC), with grant support from the ASME Foundation. ASME's affiliation with the Boy Scouts, which was spearheaded by the BPC and formalized in 1998, calls for the two organizations to work together to promote technological literacy.

A new, completely rewritten Boy Scouts Engineering Merit Badge Guide has been published, containing a new set of requirements for the badge as well as a great deal of basic information about engineering and its various specialties. The new guide will be used by many more Boy Scouts each year, introducing them to the field and career possibilities of engineering.

The new, 96-page Merit Badge Guide replaces a 40-page version dating from 1978, before the days of personal computers and the modern space program. The latest guide takes a broader, more up-to-date view of the profession, includes historical vignettes about great achievements in engineering, expands the sections on basic engineering concepts (force, energy, materials) and use of computers, and emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of engineering today.

The newly revised requirements for Scouts completing the badge include more hands-on activity, more teamwork and a closer look at how everyday items function.

The requirements and the original manuscript were prepared by the BPC's Boy Scouts Engineering Merit Badge Committee, and the book was edited and produced by the Boy Scouts of America.

Bill Nott, vice president-elect for Pre-College Education and a mechanical engineer with Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. in Sunnyvale, Calif., chaired the committee that wrote the new guide. He also helped set up photo shoots to provide illustrations. "It will increase the exposure of engineering to Scouts. The previous merit badge was not used very much — less than 2,000 copies a year were requested. But we've made the badge a lot more fun, besides updating it and including more information," Nott said.

ASME members are encouraged to become Engineering Merit Badge Counselors with their local Boy Scout troops and to use this resource to inform Scouts about engineering and give them a hands-on chance to try it.

More information is available on the ASME/Boy Scouts Partnership Web site at www.asme.org/educate/ k12/bsa/, or contact Edie Ervin at ervine@asme.org or (212) 591-7448. Copies of the guide may be obtained from local Scout Councils. They can be located with the Boy Scouts Council Finder page that is linked from the ASME Boy Scouts page.

Among the first Scouts to attain the new Engineering Merit Badge will be those attending the National Boy Scouts Jamboree this summer.

At the Jamboree, a quadrennial mass gathering of more than 30,000 Scouts to be held this year at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia from July 23 to Aug. 1, ASME volunteers will help staff the Engineering Merit Badge Booth, as they did at the 1997 Jamboree.

More than 400 scouts are expected to need help earning the badge. Volunteers are still needed, and members interested in attending the Jamboree, or part of it, should contact Edie Ervin at ervine@asme.org or Tom Perry at perryt@asme.org or (212) 591-8131.

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