by Walker Royce
Appreciate balance in lifestyle and choices.
Build a deep connection to a healthy framework of values.
Develop self-awareness in the context of group awareness.
The curriculum would provide a framework of challenging, meaningful, and memorable opportunities for adolescents in their formative stages to choose productive paths.
MOTIVATION
The camp leaders will share simple motivations. They will be people who have been reasonably successful in a diverse set of professions. They will have made a commitment to a learning experience that can help young people from all walks of life. They will share a common goal of building the next generation of leaders with a stable foundation of core values.
The camp’s core values are contained in 10 principles:
Self-respect. Personal health (mental, physical, spiritual) is a prerequisite to happiness.
Sincerity. Practice what you preach. Hypocrisy is always poisonous.
Production. Value what you produce more than what you consume.
Teamwork. Celebrate team results over individual accomplishments.
Environmentalism. Treat nature as a sanctuary of shared resources.
Insight. Diversity of thought, and critical thinking are crucial components of progress in any field.
Sharing. Communicate with purpose. Stress accuracy over precision.
8. Priorities. Do what you should before you do what you want.
9. Integrity. Build trust in all relationships. Always take the high road.
10. Balance. Build usable broad skills. Avoid obsessions.
These core values will be the basis of the camp’s atmosphere and teachings. However, one of the main purposes of the camp experience will be for participants to realize that their values may vary. We will not try to endorse and instill these values narrowly. Rather, we will try to instill them as a good example of a place to start, emphasizing the importance of personalizing and tailoring this starting point to each participant’s context, aspirations, and lifestyle.
COURSE SYLLABUS
The course of activities for this camp will span a broad range of activities and workshops spread over a few weeks.
Week 0: Pre-Work
Before attending the camp, students will be expected to complete preparatory surveys and assessments.
• Background, interests, and track record for the camp leaders to determine team assignments with diversity and balance
• Personality self-assessment, and assessments of peers, coaches, and parents
• An answer to “Who are you?” for a five-minute presentation as an introduction to the group
Daily Routine
6:00
Wake up
6:15
Morning exercise (yoga, hike, gym, mountain bike, jog), different each day
7:15
Showers
7:30
Breakfast, clean up. (Teams share cooking, cleaning, serving, and meal-planning duties.)
8:30
Daily puzzle description. (Teams work on solutions during the day, whenever they can.)
8:45
Morning instruction
11:45
Lunch, clean up
1:00
Afternoon instruction
5:00
Pre-dinner break
6:30
Dinner, clean up
8:00
Evening event: a lecture on a featured topic, skits, or reflections on the day
10:15
Puzzle solution
10:30
Personal time
11:00
Bunks
Week 1: Education
Introduction
The purpose, the principles, the students, and the coaches. Five-minute personal presentations by students. Team formation. Team workshop conducted around the principles. Presentation of the results.
Relationships/Teams/Trust
Understanding expressive-analytic-driver-amiable personality styles and how to communicate/motivate different styles. Discussion of trust as a combination of intent, competence, and capability. Establish trusted advisors.
Diversity of Thought
Multiple puzzle solving sessions to illustrate various skills of individuals and the need for multiple perspectives in solving most problems.
Communications (Listening-Speaking-Writing-Selling)
A set of four workshops focused on communicating with purpose, understanding your audience, proper preparation, and assessing the outcome.
Interviewing and being interviewed: Time management; differentiating others and yourself.
Performance assessments: Evaluating people, ranking performance, and allocating rewards.
Negotiating: Buyers and sellers negotiate a transaction based on a predefined situation. Assess the various outcomes.
Sales workshop: “Selling” your parents on bending a rule.
Estimation and Measurement
Basic statistics, differentiating accuracy from precision, estimating and measuring.
Statistical deception examples
Sampling and estimation
Measuring and estimating unknowns; dealing with uncertainty
Debates
Assess the U.S. Constitution and consider the differences between the late 1700s and early 2000s. What should be changed? Examine and appreciate both sides of societal issues.
Freedom of speech in today’s world of the internet
Right to bear arms in today’s world
Resource management (land/air/water/energy) in today’s world
Taxes and welfare in today’s world
Leadership
Five-person teams tackle five different outdoor tests. Each test uses a new person as the leader. Each test represents a relatively straightforward task that requires some analytic thinking or problem solving with limited tools, materials, or gear, and requires team effort. For example, crossing a river, climbing over a wall, getting to an out-of-reach food source, or saving a stranded colleague.
Communities/Government/Economics (Team Dynamics Exercise)
Participants will be grouped into teams and spend a full morning developing a set of membership rules for living together on a four-day trek, including organization and responsibilities, conflict resolution, governance, and values. The afternoon will be spent planning the trek, determining the gear, purchasing the supplies, and preparing for the adventure. Each team will have a budget and decide as a group how they can operate within its constraints.
Week 2: Team-Based Field Exercises
Day 1, Teamwork: Team obstacle course competition. Teams will practice as individuals in the morning on 10 events requiring diverse physical and mental skills. Based on preliminary trial runs, they will then allocate individuals across the events to maximize the team result. Constraints will be applied to assure that planning and execution require team-based decision-making and optimization across all team members.
Day 2, Applied Problem Solving: Model rocket targeting. Teams will build a simple model rocket in an evening workshop. In the morning, they will be given a simple math and physics lesson in trajectory analysis. They will get three practice shots to calibrate their rocket. In the afternoon, there will be a competition to see which team can shoot the rocket closest to a target.
Day 3, Paintball Economics: A paintball competition with predefined targets, values, costs, and consumption/production relationships. Teams will be given finite resources to purchase an initial set of different paint balls with variable purposes and values. Each paintball color will have a supply and demand profile, and the teams can trade with each other, with profit-oriented vendors, and with non-profit groups to achieve targets, compete with other teams, and win the contest by accumulating the most resources.
Days 4 and 5, Outdoor Living and Community: Introductory education on the basics of outdoor survival (water, shelter, food, fire, maps, physiology, terrain).
Cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner
outdoors. Hike to different stations during the day with lessons on water, shelter, navigation, first aid, flora, and fauna. Sleep in tents. Night telescope viewing. Lectures on astronomy and infinity.
Rope course. With rappelling, knots, and climbing.
Days 6 and 7, Give-Back Project: Complete an approved construction/improvement project at the camp. Each class will contribute something to the camp’s betterment for future classes. Build a bridge, upgrade landscaping, refurbish the dorms. Students will manage the teams, work assignments, and project execution.
Week 3: Games, Applications, and Competitions
Days 1 through 4, Survival/Evasion Trek: Navigate as a team to food sources, water sources, and shelters. (A chaperone with each team remains uninvolved unless safety issues arise.) Compose a puzzle, rather than solving one.
Day 5, Rest.
Day 6, Final Field Competition: All-day event with push ball, tug-of-war, tag-team obstacle course, orienteering, log rolling, and other activities.
Day 7, Final All-Day Treasure Hunt: Collaborative puzzle solving as a team, navigating from clue to clue across the entire camp. Intermediate treasures will include lunch and snacks. 60 minutes of introduction, 60 minutes of team planning, and 6 hours to complete. Total scores based on number of targets found, value of targets found, and time.
Awards and Graduation: Awards will be determined by the staff and camper’s peers.
Best teammates (top 5)
Most desirable person as a survival partner (trustworthiness)
Most likely to be a good boss (leadership)
The first person you would hire if you started a company (work ethic)
PREREQUISITES
Parents and campers must commit to participate and to abide by these basic rules:
No drinking, smoking, or drugs other than prescribed medications
Daily chores, schedule compliance (7 a.m. through 10 p.m.)
Discipline, respect for authority, and conformance to all policies
No TV, radio, video, cell phones, electronic or computer games except as integrated into the curriculum
Participants must be fluent in English.
Participants must be 13 to 15 years old, male or female, physically fit or not. Qualified attendees may be from all walks of life, cultures, and backgrounds.
Price is based on the ability to pay. Scholarships will be offered to schools that select low-income candidates based on our criteria and that participate in our sponsor program using the scholarship as an incentive award for the most balanced student.
CAMP INFRASTRUCTURE
Facilities
The camp would need to be in a wilderness, 200 acres or so with an integrated, self-contained set of facilities, including a dining hall, meeting hall with multiple breakout rooms, lab facilities, computer room, dormitories, outdoor lecture area, obstacle course, leadership course, rope course, paintball field, open athletic field, and access to a large area of backcountry. A typical class size would be 30 to 40 students.
Personnel
Camp staff will include 5 to 10 mentors (providing permanent camp leadership) and 5 to 10 interns (graduates who return to help run the program and continue their leadership learning experience). Camp staff will be unpaid volunteers, except for room and board. Interns will also receive room and board plus a small stipend payable on completion of a month or two of summer duty.
This appendix is a dream, but it is the dream that motivated me to write this book and start thinking about some of the material that would be the basis for some teaching workshops.
APPENDIX C.
Exercising Observation Skills
Your brain needs exercise to improve your mental agility. An active mind is an observing mind, and a key attribute of mental health. Wikipedia.org defines mental health as either a level of cognitive or emotional well-being or an absence of a mental disorder. This book probably won’t improve anyone’s emotional well-being, and it probably won’t help people avoid mental disorders. But it will certainly provide a workout for keeping your cognitive well-being in tip-top shape.
I initially constructed the puzzles in this appendix to torture (i.e., entertain) my family on holidays and other special occasions. Then I came up with an idea for an adolescent leadership camp. A key part of this vision was to demonstrate the power of group collaboration, brainstorming, and diversity of thought in general problem solving through team exercises. The puzzles have since evolved into foundations for those exercises.
In 2010, my wife and I started adapting many of these puzzles to the Geocaching community of southern New England by creating “mystery caches.” Geocachers represent the perfect audience for such mental exercise because they love good treasure hunts, especially ones that require some mystery to be solved through intellectual breakthroughs, eureka moments, or analytical detective work.
For examples of how these puzzles can be adapted to Geocaching, go to www.geocaching.com/seek/ and search for caches Hidden by: JWCOREY (our user name). These puzzles are the starting points for many of the puzzle cache descriptions. Feel free to reuse the puzzles in your local Geocaching hides. This community loves such fun.
EUREKA PUZZLES
These unique word search puzzles were crafted for teaching teamwork and diversity of thought. To solve them, you must deduce the theme by determining enough of the hidden elements that are disguised in a set of short sentences. The hidden elements could be words in the sentence, or words within words (as in the word searches presented in Chapter 2), or syllables, or letter sequences. The theme could be almost anything. There is something in each sentence that binds it to the other sentences as a set with a cohesive and well-defined identity.
The solution to each puzzle will usually be accompanied by an Aha! moment. You won’t have to ask if you have it right. You will know because everything will fit together in a way that could not be a coincidence. Eureka means I have found it, and that will be your response when the solution unfolds in your mind. Each puzzle has a title, a set of objectives, and a list of discrete sentences. The title is usually a subtle puzzle in itself, sometimes an obscure hint, or perhaps an anagram of a hint, or an obvious synonym, or even a direct hint. It usually won’t help you until you solve the theme. Once you know the theme, the title should make sense in some obscure way. Here is an example.
PUZZLE 13: SO LARS IS TIM?
Consider the following list of grammatically correct short sentences. Each sentence contains a hidden element. Together, the elements form an obvious pattern or connection to a common theme. The title is a subtle hint, probably too subtle to understand the connection until you have discovered the common theme.
To solve this puzzle, you need to:
• Discover the hidden elements in the sentences and deduce the theme that binds those elements together as a set.
Some inept, uneducated people fell into the scam-artist’s trap.
General Motors initiated the Saturn brand to compete with Japan.
There were only seven usable images in the whole batch of photos.
Nondescript, vague art hung in every room.
Opossums, koalas, and kangaroos are examples of marsupials.
Jupiter, Florida, is a popular retirement community.
If you concur, an usher will take you to your new seat.
The San Jose Mercury News is the primary newspaper in Silicon Valley.
Goofy and Pluto are the original Disney dogs.
Turn the page to see the answer.
Did you find it? Each sentence contains the name of one of the nine planets of our solar system. With that knowledge, the connection to the title should be possible to reason through. If you speak the title in a slurred way, you should come up with something close to “solar system.”
Some inept, uneducated people fell into the scam-artist’s trap.
General Motors initiated the Saturn brand to compete with Japan.
There were only seven usable images in the whole batch of photos.
Non-descript, vague art hung in every room.
Opossums, koalas, and kangaroos are examples of marsupials.
Jupiter, Florida, is a popular retirement community.
If you concur, an usher will take you to your new seat.
The San Jose Mercury News is the primary newspaper in Silicon Valley.
Goofy and Pluto are the original Disney dogs.
That was easy enough. Here’s a more obscure puzzle.
PUZZLE 14. IN THE NEWS
Consider the following list of grammatically correct short sentences. Each sentence contains two hidden elements. Together, the elements form an obvious pattern or connection to a common theme. The title is a subtle hint.
To solve this puzzle, you need to:
• Discover the two related hidden elements in each sentence and the theme that binds these sentences together as a set.
If the Red Sox win or the Yankees lose, we move up in the standings.
John’s outhouse was thirty meters down past his garage.
We left the brand-new establishment with a poor first impression.
They were astounded by how right he had been all along.