The Scout electronics badge sponsored by the IET

I have a current Scout. When we joined, the troop leaders asked what badges we might be interested in doing and might already have some evidence for. We did look at the Electronics badge and quickly discounted it.

It should be noted that in order to achieve the Chief Scouts Gold Badge you need to complete 6 activity badges, but otherwise achieving the badges comes down to the interests of the Scout involved and the leaders to run the activity. Given that Scouts focus on outdoors activities (camping, hiking, etc) the were already covering ample badges.

It comes down to enough people in the troop and the leaders themselves being interested in the badge. In our case, the troop has a very outdoors bias and tended to focus on sports and games if trapped inside by the weather (and crafty type activities only when trapped online by covid).

Compare with some other badges, this one is very involved! There is some specialised equipment required. Some of the online materials on the Scouts website looked a little dated and it would of been an effort to tailor it for what we had to hand (RPi's and Codebugs). So we left it to focus on some easier badges.

So the answer to the question - it looked difficult enough that we didn't do it

Interesting,  in our group we encourage scouts to do their own thing, and very few have as few as 6 badges on their sleeves - that's about what they do with us in the troop meetings per year - the rest, the photography, the horse riding, swimming, ballet, the playing a trombone whatever it is, they do at home and bring the evidence in, and for the more interesting ones they talk about it to the rest of the troop. Its not that uncommon for keen ones to almost need extensible sleeves for all the badges they have acquired by age 14  and a half. Equally some never manage more than the one or two per term that happen during the weekly meetings.

But as I said above groups really do vary a lot and

" ... tend to follow the characters of the leaders available and the local youngsters, so  there are some more indoor groups, groups that seem to do lots of outdoor cooking and bivying, groups that are a quite youth-club like and play a lot of games, and others that seem to rival the local army cadets for marching and shouting .."

It would be interesting but sadly almost impossible to find out, how many of these badges are completed per year over the country. As far as I know there is no mechanism for centrally recording badges awarded, except the very high level stuff like Chief scouts awards etc - which are set at a level that most Scouts never achieve, and only a few youngsters per troop are awarded that per year, but they do get to meet the Lord Mayor at the presentation..

( Well, round here at least  - perhaps in another county nearly everyone gets it ;-)  - standardized it certainly ain't. )

Mike

A small number, maybe 1 or 2 of my sons troop get the Gold each year, but interestingly it gets presented by the Scout Leader or maybe the Group Scout Leader if you are lucky. Definitely not the Lord Mayor.

Once the child is in their final year as a Scout, the troop leaders look at where they are and have a push to get them to the gold. I think if they didn't do that it would be likely that no-one would achieve it most years.

My son is in explorers now, so it will be interesting to see what difference that makes. I suspect their focus will be primarily on DoE.

A small number, maybe 1 or 2 of my sons troop get the Gold each year, but interestingly it gets presented by the Scout Leader or maybe the Group Scout Leader if you are lucky. Definitely not the Lord Mayor.

Once the child is in their final year as a Scout, the troop leaders look at where they are and have a push to get them to the gold. I think if they didn't do that it would be likely that no-one would achieve it most years.

My son is in explorers now, so it will be interesting to see what difference that makes. I suspect their focus will be primarily on DoE.