We start the scouting adventure on the Trail to First Class, with the scout learning first-aid, outdoor and survival skills, plus physical fitness and staying healthy. All of these skills plus more help them along the journey to apply them in later stages of Scouting.
The next step on the journey is to use the skills you have learned and apply them, through service hours, merit badges and leadership. Merit Badges are divided into 2 different categories eagle required and elective. Elective merit badges can be fun or can be used to learn new skills to see if you are good or interested in things, these things that you learn from merit badges can even help you to select you a career. Eagle required merit badges are useful because they can help to teach basic life and outdoor skills that can useful in scouts and in everyday life. Some of these skills could be managing money, staying physically active, or even life-saving first-aid.
One of the last steps to the journey of scouting is working on eagle, your eagle project, a project which helps your community in some way big or small. The whole process starts with you coming up with an idea and then getting the idea approved, the next step is to get funding, then you take that funding and recruit some volunteers from your troop and getting to working on the project. Another part of getting eagle is to get 21 merit badges, 13 being eagle required. Eagle is one of the biggest achievements in Scouting and only 1% of scouts get eagle!
