Engineer Activity Badge

When we did the Engineer activity badge, we invited an engineer to come talk to us about engineering.  He did a great job and covered many of our requirements with the Scouts.  We built bridges out of paper and blocks as is suggested in the book and tested them with toy cars.  The Scouts thought that was fun and seemed to grasp the concept well.  One Scout was even talking about it months later.  We had each Scout draw a floor plan of his home as is required, and then I held onto the drawings until we did the Readyman activity badge; we simply added onto them for the fire escape plan.  We also built wooden catapults using kits from the Scout store.  We used our catapults to have a miniature marshmallow war!  I made a castle out of foam board with the windows and doors cut out, then covered in tissue paper strips.  The Scouts tried to shoot out the tissue paper with the marshmallows.  They had a great time!  We also made an electric circuit differently than is suggested in the book because flashlights are not made the same way anymore.  We used a board, nails, wire, and a small metal strip as a switch.  We had the nails in the boards, and the Scouts assembled by putting in the battery, bulb, and attaching the wires.  Here is a photo of what the circuit looked like: