Consulting with Stacie Rohrbach
04/10/17
Published in
3 min readApr 10, 2017
As a Communication Design professor at CMU School of Design and also a Girl Scouts Troop Leader Stacie was extremely helpful in our research. Her seven years of experience with her 2 daughters in Girl Scouts allowed us to gain deep insights into the the pain points and appropriate points of intervention. With one daughter already a Cadette (grade 7) and one a Junior (grades 4–5), Stacie has great knowledge about our specific age group.
- Gold, Silver, and Bronze Awards, and Journeys
The Gold award, for the oldest level of Girl Scout, the Silver award for Cadettes, and the Bronze award for Juniors. These awards are much more significant than badges and require a lot of effort and initiative from the girls. To achieve the bronze badge Juniors spend 1–2 years designing their own initiative that has three component: a change made by myself, as a team, and as a community. A critical part of the journey is having girls create the a journey based on their own interests and taking initiative. - Badge Selections
At the beginning of Girl Scout season, in September, the troop will meet and go through the badge options for the season. The girls think of their own interests and skills, and as a group decide which badges they’ll try to achieve in a season. Usually a troop will only have time to get about three badges in a season. The Junior Scouts have a trend in their badge selections, most of them tend to be animal or arts related such as product designer, jeweller, artist, animal habitats, etc. - Achieving a Badge
Troop leaders will work through the binder pages for completing a badge and help support and guide the girls to completing the requirements. There are usually 5 steps, with 3 options each on how to complete each step. For instance, for the Product Design badge, for one of the steps the girls could either observe, photograph, or interview to learn more about how product designers work. Since Stacie teaches at a design school, she will be bringing her troop in to observe the product designers here at CMU. She may then assign a small homework to the girls to enhance their learning. Once Stacie took her troop on an overnight hiking trip, which allowed the girls to complete part of their Night Owl badge, as well as part of their Cook badge, as their cooked all their meals over the trip. - Biggest pain points as a troop leader
Handling parents is easily the worst part of being a troop leader. Parent’s are late to drop off, late to pick up, or won’t answer communications on time. Handling the girls is easy, the only issues are consistent with anyone who has to deal with young girls. They can occasionally whine or become disinterested, but will become engaged again in order to get a badge.
