Information exploration
You’ll need
- Pens or pencils
- Scrap paper
- Access to the internet
- Reference materials
Before you begin
- You’ll need to gather reference materials.
- It’s up to you whether you visit a local library or tourist information centre, use reference materials you already have at your meeting place, or ask people to bring some from home.
- Reference materials could include: bus or train timetables, tourist attraction leaflets, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, atlases, maps, books such as ‘Guinness World Records’, or travel guidebooks.
- For the ‘Reference relay’, you’ll need multiple copies of each item (enough to give one to each group of four or five people).
- Once you’ve got the reference materials, plan the questions for the ‘Reference relay’. People should be able to answer them with information in the materials. It’s good to plan a mix of simpler and trickier questions.
- It’ll be easier to ‘Plan your exploration investigation’ if you’ve already decided on a rough location so your reference materials are relevant for the area people have chosen.
- In Scouts, an exploration is a ‘purpose with a journey’ – they’re one of the ways to get your Expedition Challenge Award.
Reference relay
- The person leading the activity should ask if anyone knows what a reference material is. Reference materials are books or leaflets that people look at to find specific information they need.
- Everyone should split into teams of four or five people.
- The person leading the activity should put all of the reference materials at one end of the meeting place.
- Each team should line up on the other side of the meeting place.
- The person leading the activity should call out a question based on the reference materials available.
- Each group should quickly decide what kind of reference material they’ll need to answer the question.
- One person from each group should run and get the reference material and bring it back to their group.
- The groups should look through the reference material until they find the right answer. The first group to find the right answer wins a point.
- Everyone should keep repeating steps four to eight (replacing the reference materials each time) until the person leading the activity’s run out of questions.
- Each team should take some reference materials and think of questions of their own. They should jot their questions (and the answers) down.
- Teams should take it in turns to ask their questions while the other groups decide on a reference material, fetch it, and use it to answer the question. Everyone should swap roles until all of the teams’ questions have been asked.
- If there’s internet access, the person leading the activity should call out a random question. Each team should use a device connected to the internet to find the answer.
- Everyone should play one final round where they choose whether to use paper or online reference materials. The person leading the activity should ask a question, and the groups should race to find the answer first. Which method is quickest?
Plan your exploration investigation
- Everyone should split into groups of about four people. They should find a space (chairs around a table usually work well and grab some scrap paper and pens or pencils.
- Each group should think about a theme for their exploration investigation, for example, nature, buildings, culture, society, environment, history, or science.
- Each group should use the reference materials to make a plan for their exploration. They could use the 'Exploration planner' to help.
- Everyone should share their ideas.
- Everyone should give helpful, constructive feedback on other groups’ ideas. If there’ll be using the plans to run explorations, it’s a great chance to get feedback on practical things.
For the Expedition Challenge Award, Scouts can do an exploration (a purpose with a journey) travelling to an area to carry out an investigation, or an expedition (a journey with a purpose) completing a task or small project.
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Exploration |
Expedition |
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Group size |
4+ |
4+ |
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Time |
2 days, 90+ minutes travel to destination, 5+ hours of investigation over 2 days (following previous research) |
2 days, 4+ hours travel per day |
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Night away |
1 night away |
1 night away |
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Accommodation |
Campsite, bunk house, hostel or similar |
Campsite, bunk house, hostel or similar |
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Location |
Countryside, town or city area not well known to team |
Countryside or suburban area, ideally not well known to team |
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Transport |
Foot, cycle, public transport, other |
Foot, cycle, canoe, horse, other |
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Route planning |
Rest/meal stops and timings |
Rest/meal stops and timings |
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Equipment |
Appropriate for terrain, mode of travel, and to deal with emergencies (NB: If camping, Scouts are not required to carry camping equipment) |
Appropriate for terrain, mode of travel, and to deal with emergencies (NB: If camping, Scouts are not required to carry camping equipment) |
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Navigation |
Timetables, street map, A-Z, compass, GPS |
OS map, compass, GPS |
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Emergencies |
Emergency plan |
Emergency plan |
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Catering |
Cooking and eating 1+ hot meal themselves (for example, using a kitchen, lightweight stove, or campfire) |
Cooking and eating 1+ hot meal themselves (for example, using a kitchen, lightweight stove, or campfire) |
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Purpose |
An investigation of an area |
Task or small project |
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Permits needed |
Nights Away plus possibly Hillwalking or Canoeing |
Nights Away plus possibly Hillwalking, Cycling or Canoeing |
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Event Passport |
May be issued to a Scout who will lead the rest of the team during Nights Away (Overnight venue should be aware and agree to this if the Scouts are to be unsupervised) |
May be issued to a Scout who will lead the rest of the team during Nights Away (Overnight venue should be aware and agree to this if the Scouts are to be unsupervised) |
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Report back |
Report, performance, video, presentation, blog, website |
Report, performance, video, presentation, blog, website |
For either option, Scouts must have appropriate adult supervision bearing in mind their age, experience, the terrain and activity. As a minimum, such supervision should involve a visual check at the beginning and end of the day, and an adult being available in the local area. It would not usually be an appropriate challenge for the Scouts to be accompanied at all times by an adult. Rules and guidance on peer led activities can be found in POR.
You should ensure that you follow the rules and guidance for running Nights Away experiences, such as relevant activity permits and nights away permits, InTouch, parental permission and first aid arrangements.
Reflection
This activity was all about dreaming big and gaining the skills people need to be more independent now and in the future. It’s hard to do all of this without making mistakes – this activity gave everyone the chance to get feedback from others, so was a great opportunity to try things out. How did people find getting feedback? It’s not always easy to hear what people think. Is it better for a friend to (kindly) point out your mistake in the meeting place, or to find out in the middle of the exploration, after you’ve got on the wrong bus? When else may it be useful to be able to listen to and act on feedback? People may think about school or work, or even about being a good friend.
This activity also needed people to problem-solve. Putting the minimum work in here wasn’t an option – hopefully people grabbed the chance to find out about something they find interesting with the friends. Did anyone come across any problems that were difficult to solve? Perhaps there was a great attraction, but it didn’t work with public transport or budgets. How did they solve problems? How did people work together to make decisions in their groups? Did anyone take the easy way out at any point? What did people learn from their feedback?
Safety
All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.
- Active games
The game area should be free of hazards. Explain the rules of the game clearly and have a clear way to communicate that the game must stop when needed. Take a look at our guidance on running active games safely.
- Online safety
Supervise young people when they’re online and give them advice about staying safe. Take a look at our online safety or bullying guidance. The NSPCC offers more advice and guidance, too. If you want to know more about specific social networks and games, Childnet has information and safety tips for apps. You can also report anything that’s worried you online to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command. As always, if you’ve got concerns about a young person’s welfare, including their online experiences, follow the Yellow Card to make a report.
It’s good to prepare a mixture of simple and complex questions, so you can adapt depending on how quickly your teams pick up the challenge. The more specific the question, the longer it’ll take teams to find the answer. For example, ‘name one bus you could take to the nearby town’ is easier to answer than ‘what time is the first bus after 9am on a Wednesday that could take you from our meeting place to the town centre’.
If you can’t collect several copies of paper resources, give each group a complete list of questions. As long as each group only takes one resource at a time, everyone should be able to take it in turns to answer all of the questions without waiting around. You could still add in a few competitive races where people take it in turns to rush to and find the right resource.
The teams in this activity should support each other, for example, if anyone struggles with reading.
You could put the resources on a table if this makes it easier for people to reach them.
You could remove the need to run around by giving each team a copy of all the resources. They’ll still need to hunt through to find the right one.
When they’re planning their exploration, adults should support people to make sure the exploration works for everyone, including people with additional needs.
All Scout activities should be inclusive and accessible.
Young people should get involved in booking activities and creating a detailed route. You could also think about using event passports for the trip.
People could get stuck in straight away by writing all of their own questions. Young people should be as creative as they want while choosing their own theme and planning their exploration.