It’s day two of the National Scout Jamboree in West Virginia, a ten-day celebration of scouting held about once every four years. I’m working the Out of Eden Walk booth, situated between the merit badge tents for surveying and chess.
Scouts puzzle through a game that challenges them to use visual and text clues to locate Out of Eden Walk Milestones on a map.
Mark Schulte
Four scouts from east Texas peer intently at my Middle East and Central Asia map. Paul’s team at National Geographic created this deceptively simple game to engage the kids in the story of the walk so far. Their goal: to match up five Milestones—photographs and captions every hundred miles along the trail—to markers along the 5,000-mile red zigzag that connects Ethiopia with Kyrgyzstan.
“This caption mentions the Kurds, and I think they’re up here around northern Iraq,” says Noah, one of the Texans. “And this guy looks like he might be Saudi.”
The game is part of a toolkit developed in a partnership between the Pulitzer Center and the Boy Scouts of America to train the 40,000 scouts at the jamboree how to observe and record their experiences thoughtfully and with intention. How to be, in other words, slow journalists.
Passport Journals, issued to every scout on arrival at the jamboree, provide prompts for reflection during service days and hikes. There are links to learn more about the Out of Eden Walk, and a page presenting a tantalizing opportunity: One scout from the jamboree, and one from the Philmont Scout Ranch, will join Paul on the trail for a hike in Asia at the end of the year.
The scouts from Texas settle on their matches for the game. They’ve figured it out together, a group effort. Some of them are excited about the possibility of walking along with Paul, others seem happy simply to have a journal for their thoughts.
“I’ll want to look back on this and remember everything I did,” Noah says. “It’s going by pretty fast.”
Scouts puzzle through a game that challenges them to use visual and text clues to locate Out of Eden Walk Milestones on a map.
Mark Schulte
Four scouts from east Texas peer intently at my Middle East and Central Asia map. Paul’s team at National Geographic created this deceptively simple game to engage the kids in the story of the walk so far. Their goal: to match up five Milestones—photographs and captions every hundred miles along the trail—to markers along the 5,000-mile red zigzag that connects Ethiopia with Kyrgyzstan.
“This caption mentions the Kurds, and I think they’re up here around northern Iraq,” says Noah, one of the Texans. “And this guy looks like he might be Saudi.”
The game is part of a toolkit developed in a partnership between the Pulitzer Center and the Boy Scouts of America to train the 40,000 scouts at the jamboree how to observe and record their experiences thoughtfully and with intention. How to be, in other words, slow journalists.
Passport Journals, issued to every scout on arrival at the jamboree, provide prompts for reflection during service days and hikes. There are links to learn more about the Out of Eden Walk, and a page presenting a tantalizing opportunity: One scout from the jamboree, and one from the Philmont Scout Ranch, will join Paul on the trail for a hike in Asia at the end of the year.
The scouts from Texas settle on their matches for the game. They’ve figured it out together, a group effort. Some of them are excited about the possibility of walking along with Paul, others seem happy simply to have a journal for their thoughts.
“I’ll want to look back on this and remember everything I did,” Noah says. “It’s going by pretty fast.”
