Meet the new Explorer Activity Badges
Learn all about our new Explorer Activity Badges and how they can be adapted
Quick links
We’re excited to introduce a new set of Activity Badges for Explorers, and they’re not just shiny new additions to the programme. They’re built differently. They’re built to empower.
At the heart of the Explorer Programme redesign is a simple but powerful idea: young people should shape their own experience. These new badges are all about giving Explorers the tools, space and support to do just that.
Designed with purpose: The Experience Principles
Every badge is built around a set of experience principles. Think of them as creative prompts or mini-missions that help Explorers design their own journey. These principles guide the kind of activities young people can choose, and they’re all about real-world learning, collaboration and self-discovery.
Here’s the line-up:
- Discover – Learn something new
- Mobilise – Bring others together
- Create – Bring something into existence
- Experience – Try something out
- Solve – Fix a problem
- Reflect – Know and care for yourself
Heads up: Reflection isn’t part of the Activity Badges, but it’s baked into everything else we do, because thinking about what you’ve learnt is just as important as doing it.
Structure that supports, not restricts
To earn an Activity Badge, Explorers complete three activities, each linked to a different principle. We’ll provide example activities to spark ideas, but here’s the key: they don’t have to follow our suggestions exactly.
As long as their chosen activities align with the principles, they’re good to go. That means more flexibility, more creativity and more ownership.
Unlike other sections where requirements can feel rigid, these badges are built to flex. Whether your Explorer is a budding coder, a community organiser, or someone who’s just figuring out what they love, there’s room for them to shape their badge around their interests and strengths.
What this looks like in practise
Here's an example of what this might look like in practise for the Chef Activity Badge:
To earn the Chef Activity Badge, Explorers complete three activities, each linked to a different experience principle.
Here’s what that looks like:
- Discover – Choose a recipe, a cooking technique or a traditional food, and find out about its history.
Try making something using traditional methods and ingredients, avoiding modern techniques. - Experience – Hold a cooking competition with your Unit or District.
- Mobilise – Look at the social issues that surround our food production, and see if you can take any actions to reduce their impact.
This could involve researching certain ingredients, or visiting production facilities or farms. - Solve – Plan a recipe or menu you’d make in your usual kitchen facilities.
Then, try and make that using a different cooking facility, like a camping stove or campfire. Think about how you could improvise utensils and maintain hygiene. - Create – Create a menu for a specific event.
This could be anything from a gala-style dinner to a street food tasting night!
If your Explorer wants to do their Chef badge on camp, using backwoods cooking techniques (think foil packs, stick bread, fire pits and wild ingredients), here’s how you might flex the requirements while keeping all five experience principles intact:
- Discover - Research traditional outdoor cooking methods used by different cultures, like ember baking, clay cooking or spit roasting.
Learn about the history of backwoods cooking and how people cooked before modern kitchens. - Experience - Run a backwoods cooking challenge with your Unit. Set up different stations (fire building, prep, cooking, serving) and try out various techniques.
Make it fun, competitive and collaborative. - Mobilise - Explore the environmental impact of food waste and packaging on camp.
Work with your group to reduce waste, maybe by using locally sourced ingredients, reusable containers or cooking with minimal equipment. - Solve - Take a recipe you’d normally cook at home and adapt it for the campfire.
Think about how to improvise utensils (e.g. using sticks, foil or natural materials), manage hygiene and cook safely without a kitchen. - Create - Design a themed backwoods menu for a special camp event, like a 'wild feast night' or 'forest café'.
Include starter, main and dessert, and think about how to present it creatively using natural materials.
Flex your programme with real-world issues
Another great example of how to flex a badge to reflect what matters most to your Explorers is through our Votes for 16 resources.
These resources allow you to explore democratic participation through an alternative set of activities for the Democracy Activity Badge. They show how badges can connect to current issues while still meeting the badge’s themes and using the Explorer experience principles to support learning.
From time to time, we’ll provide extra support for national campaigns or topics of wider interest, helping you link badge activities to real-world issues. You’ll find these ideas highlighted in tips boxes on badge pages, shared as blogs on Explorer pages, and included in your programme emails.
Final thoughts
These adapted versions still meet all the Explorer experience principles, while giving young people the chance to shape badges around their interests and environment. The Chef and Democracy badges are both great examples of how the new programme encourages flexibility, creativity, and youth-led learning.
Whether it’s cooking outdoors on camp or exploring how young people can influence decisions, Explorers build confidence, resilience and skills through meaningful, real-world experiences.
If you can adapt badges like Chef or Democracy to suit your Explorers’ passions and context, you can adapt any badge. The principles stay the same.
So whether it’s cooking over a campfire, developing a campaign, or organising a community event, the badge is just the starting point. The real power lies in how young people shape it.
Whether you're looking for an adventure, a recipe, a game, a craft or something else, our activity finder's bursting with programme ideas.
Master something you love, or try something shiny and new. If it spurs you on or stirs your interest, we’ve probably got a badge for it.
You don't need a uniform to join Explorers. But once you've settled in, you'll start speedily earning badges, and you'll need to know where to put them.
Flexibility and adaptability
This programme is designed to be flexible and easily adapted to the needs of your unit and every single young person who is a part of it. There are some reasonable adjustments that you may want to consider, as well as specific guidance around making changes to activities, badges and awards.