Skills Training, 31st March

Hey Guides! :-) On Friday, we had Skills Training for the Year 3s, while the Year 1s and Year 2s went for their Total Defence Training Course. This will be a rather short blog post!

Here’s how it goes:

Year 3s will be given 1 hour to build a structure revolving around the theme “mystery”. They will first be given 10 mins to discuss and sketch out their structure on a piece of paper, and are not allowed to take more logistics than specified. They are to plan the flow of the steps they need to have to build the structure. This to allow the IC to efficiently allocate manpower without missing out any specific details that are needed to be taken. Year 4s are to evaluate the problems potentially face and hint to them before they carry on with the activity. Be sure to assign the IC, constantly reminding them of the involvement of all Year 3s (suggestions from the batchmates). Throughout the activity, crises will be presented. 

Crises:
- Not being able to walk (forces other Y3s to step out and look at the bigger picture)
- Blind (closing eyes)
- Not allowed to speak
- Bear attack (where they are to adapt and face the situation at hand)

Reflection from a Year 3:

We were told to collect 10 白木, 10 青木, 7 红木, 5 黄木 and sufficient 麻绳. Then, we were briefed on what to do. We had to build a structure, which had to be relevant to the theme of Mystery, in 1 hour. We would be given 10 minutes to discuss and draw the structure. However, we had to make use of the 木 that we had collected beforehand, and we were not allowed to take any more 木. I felt that during the discussion process, we were relatively efficient as many of us were eager to contribute ideas that would help the building of the structure.

Not long after, we then decided to build a bridge with a tripod on each end. However, the bridge was designed to be broken and uneven in the middle, to signify that our journey ahead to the unknown was a mystery and we would discover many challenges and obstacles ahead.

Halfway through the activity, the Year 4s reduced our time of 1 hour to 20 minutes, as we had a lot of manpower and our structure was relatively simple to build. They also appointed 2 of our batchmates as Patrol Leader and Patrol Second. We then split the manpower with 7 people working on the tripods, while the rest worked on building the uneven bridge. 

However, the lightning alert sounded after 7 minutes, so we had to move all our logistics to the MRL and continue our activity there. I felt that the rain and the sudden change in duration had dampened our spirits, thus we began working at a slower pace. Even though we cheered, it was not sufficient as the rain drowned out our voices and we did not cheer in sync, which caused our batch morale to decrease. We also failed to communicate effectively. Some people were "injured" and thus were unable to move. However, the others who were not injured did not know about this due to the lack of communication among the injured and non-injured. This resulted in the inability to assign appropriate roles to people who were free and thus time was wasted. Moreover, many of our lashes were loose and we had to 重抽 most of them, which resulted in our Patrol Leader having to ask for multiple time extensions and getting punished, even though it could have been avoided if we had put in more effort to tie the lashes correctly the first time and worked at a faster pace. Worst of all, we had failed to take care of our logistics and manpower, which caused 50 individual logistics and manpower being kupped. As a result, we had to do a forfeit of 2 jumping jacks for every item kupped.

In the end, the bridge turned out to be unstable as we had only used a 黄木 to suspend the bridge, and none of us possessed enough foresight to make additional changes to improve the stability of our structure. At the end of the day, we sat down and reflected on this activity, such as our areas for improvement and positive aspects of our attitude. I think all of us would agree that this 集合 had truly been an invaluable learning experience.

Published by:

Chen Wei
48th Batch Secretary