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Comment by gremy0 | Hacker News Reader

You can do STEM outside and with your friends. There's quite a bit of science outside.

It's true, but if you look at the list of badges, the point above some of them being, in a way, "out of context", makes sense (I don't say it's right in a strict sense; just that it makes sense).

I don't have knowledge of the existing badges though. Certainly, Financial Literacy doesn't sound very outdoors-y :-)

How is it possible to do anything outdoorsy without a budget? Even getting there takes transport money. When I was in Boy Scouts, budgeting for and buying supplies for even a weekend trip was a task the adults did not shelter us from. We also had to do fundraising and keep track of available funds.

This. A long-weekend backpacking trip can easily cost between $20 and $100 per person, depending on: distance traveled and size of cars, tolls, number of days on the trail, whether you need perishables such as fuel for cooking and water filters (often weather and trail dependent), meals eaten on the road, trail passes or campground fees, rental fees if you're planning on floating a portion of the trip, etc. Up-front purchases (e.g., backpack, boots) need to be accounted for as well. Also really basic stuff like "do we have enough cash to pay for campsites along the way".

It's a great opportunity to teach basic accounting skills. Simple stuff: summing costs, figuring out which costs are shared by the group and which ones individuals should be responsible for, planning ahead for forms of payment. More advanced: amortization of big expenses across N years of trips (and related cash flow issues), parameterizing cost calculations over weather conditions and terrain, doing all of this in a spreadsheet so that when we do the trip next year we can change some values and know immediately how much it'll cost, etc.

It's not hard to work finance into all sorts of interactions. Take making cardboard sandals on a blanket outside. You can bring out all of the raw materials: cardboard, string, tape, paint, etc. List the prices for each. Then, figure out how many sandals were made. Add up the costs, and compute the average material cost for each pair of sandals they make. Girls get into it. One might even say: "yea, but we worked on this too; doesn't that count?" You can then factor in labour cost. Then, comes a few eyes that get big: "wow, $2.45 in materials and $5 in labour" (they debated and agreed it'd be great if someone paid them $5 for the hour they spent). Lots of lessons emerged: labor can be the dominant factor in product construction; and noone was really going to pay $7.45 for the cardboard sandals.

"Financial literacy" is a category - not a badge. The badges in that category for 2nd and 3rd graders were Money Management (maybe all those cookie sales?) and Philanthropy... which are things most troops do anyway.

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