As Scouts do, we did some compass learning and practise recently. We had some great success with a compass word game that let us practise with a lot of bearings in a short period of time and a lot less work to set up than a traditional orienteering course.
We laid out a circle of letters and calculated the bearings between them to spell words. We used a bunch of 8-letter words that were relevant to us as Sea Scouts. Some examples are STARBOARD, WINDWARD, DECKHAND, KNOTWORK, BOATSWAIN, CLOSEREACH, BROADREACH and many more. It was a huge hit, everybody had fun and took way more bearings in the process than I have ever seen Scouts do before!
Here are a few photos from our recent evening near our Scout Hall:
If you’d like to try it yourself, we now have the calculation code baked into a web page so you can just plug in your words and get the circle and all the bearings you need to do it. You can come up with your own list and Scouter Ben’s tool will generate all the bearings for your circle and for the words. All you’ll need to do is lay it out (be very careful and precise with your bearings and distances!) and create the bearings cards for the Scouts to use.