Survey Results: Ambassador Badges

Were you wondering if I was ever going to get to Ambassadors?  For those who are not following along, this is the fourth in a series of posts recounting the results of a survey about Girl Scouts' older girl program.  Here are the other posts:  

• General responses about the program
• Cadette Badges
• Senior Badges

This post will cover the responses about Ambassador badges.  I'll put my usual disclaimer in here:  I'm not a professional survey designer and the Facebook groups I poll are almost certainly not a random sampling of Girl Scouts or Girl Scout leaders.  I don't claim these results would hold up if a professional wrote a randomly delivered survey. I just noticed that the Think Like a Journeys were left off my award list, so I don't know how popular they are with this age group. Do you? 

The Older Girl Program: Survey Results

 After publishing my posts regarding surveys I did about the Daisy and Brownie programs, some people asked "What about the older girls?" thinking that as often happens in Girl Scouts, the older girls were left out.  Well, it took a while but I finally did an older girl survey and here are the results.

Who Responded? 

Of the 240 responses I got, 13 were from current Girl Scouts.  207 were from current leaders of older girls. 60 were from adults who were Girl Scouts past Juniors.  114 were parents of current or former older Girl Scouts.  

About 68% of people picked one of my reasons why they or their girls are still in Girl Scouts.  The others 32% had a variety of answers.  The choices I gave were:

• Its what they do with that group of friends (13.9%)
• The outdoor activities (19%)
• To work on the Gold for college/career prep (8.7%)
• It's fun (32%)
• Travel (3.9%)

Think Like a Citizen Scientist for Cadettes, Seniors and Ambassadors

Think Like a Citizen Scientist is one of the newer STEM Journies GSUSA put out in the last few years. This post is an attempt to summarize the lengthy VTK plans into an easy-to-read quick resource. Once you have decided to lead the Journey at a particular level, I highly recommend reviewing the VTK plans and their talking points. I also recommend going to the GSUSA store and downloading the (at this writing) free packet for this Journey.  It does the best job of explaining the TAP process of anything I've seen GSUSA publish

The way these Journeys are designed, it is clear that the TAP is an integral part.  The purpose of the Journey is learn scientific skills and then to apply those skills to conceiving, planning and carrying out a TAP.  If you as a leader are trying to come up with TAP ideas before the Journey ever starts, you are doing it wrong.  

As the girls are brainstorming for their TAP the girls are reminded that the same process is used in developing projects for the Silver and Gold Awards and that they can use projects the group decides not to do, or they can expand on a group idea or design other projects to solve the same problems.

Think Like an Engineer for Cadettes, Seniors and Ambassadors

A couple of years ago GSUSA released a new series of Journeys for Daisies, Brownies and Juniors, and last year, released two of them for Cadettes, Seniors and Ambassadors.  Even though this is mostly a blog about my experiences with Daisies and Brownies, I had a request to summarize the older girls' Think Like an Engineer Journey and since I was doing it, I figured I ought to get a few cents from AdSense for doing so (and more if you click on the ads on this page).