NPC Cluster Pioneering

It was the day our troop first met up with the full patrol of RI 01's Scout unit to do our cluster pioneering. Since it was an NPC grading session, i was quite pressured. Besides that, the time limit and all the examiners watching also added on to my pressure. Furthermore, that pioneering session was only my first few pioneering sessions that i had, thus i was quite nervous about the quality of my knots and lashings and how i may pull the team down. However, as soon as we reached the school, we realized that we did not bring rope. So my APL Spencer and I rushed back to school to get the ropes. Thankfully, we did not took to long and work already started with our PL Lim Tao giving clear instructions on how the frames should be laid out. Our plan for the pioneering structure was to build a playground consisting of three boxes made up of two frames connected with a diagonal lash on the support poles. The beginning of the session went well because both PLs from the troops were working well together to give out instructions and keep the motivation level high and with that, we managed to bring up two boxes. However, problems started to arise when when we wanted to build the net that was supposed to connect the two boxes. Non of us knew the correct knot used to tie the netting and we wasted  lot of time trying to figure that out. Other than that, it also started to rain during the middle of the session and this caused us to waste a longer period of time. By the time the rain stopped, most of us were already tired and were not motivated to continue tying and before we knew it, the time was already up and we could not finish the final structure on time.

After this session, I had many learning takeaways. Firstly, i learnt that communication was important because if everyone is not informed about the plan, everyone will be confused when they are tasked with something. For example the netting, we probably did not informed everybody about this idea and thus led to us not being able to make preparations for it, which ultimately caused us to waste time. Besides that, I have also learnt that having good time management was important. I felt that our mistake was choosing the 8 hours pioneering session rather than 4 hours each on 2 days. I felt that the second option was better because we could have discussed on what went wrong during the first pioneering session and improve on it the next time and this could ultimately prevent more problems during the actual pioneering in the actual NPC Camp

                                                            Our pioneering structure design^