Some of what's here lines up with parts of the Scouting America Artificial Intelligence merit badge. This page shows which parts, which ones it doesn't touch, and where to go instead.
Read this first. This is a free study resource, not an official Scouting America page, and it doesn't replace your counselor. This badge has no pamphlet by design — it is built around Scoutly, Scouting America's own chatbot, which is trained only on official Scouting documents and sits at the bottom right of scouting.org. Start there. Work from the official requirements, which change. Your counselor decides when a requirement is complete.
Ages 11–12: the kids rooms. Ages 13 and up: the teen walk. Either works for the requirements below — the teen track covers the same ground in a voice built for high school.
Honest about the gaps: four of the eight requirements are only partly covered here, and two aren't covered at all. Nothing on this site completes a requirement by itself — your counselor does that.
| Requirement | How much this helps | Where to go |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Key concepts | ◐ Helps with part | Sixteen terms to define and explain to your counselor — among them automation, workflow, trigger, variable, narrow AI, general AI, superintelligent AI and machine learning. Our glossary is strong on the chatbot vocabulary and thin on the automation half, so Scoutly is the better first stop for those. You write your own definitions either way. |
| 2 · AI basics | ◐ Helps with part | Ten everyday examples, five workplace, five school, ten rounds of the “AI or Not?” game, and a five-milestone timeline. Room 2 sorts the whole AI family, which is where the everyday examples come from, and teen Station 07 covers school use. The game is played with your counselor. The timeline is not covered here. |
| 3 · Automation basics | ○ Not covered here | Same five sub-parts as Requirement 2, but for automation, plus explaining how automation handles repetitive work without a human, cuts errors and saves resources. We do not teach this yet — it is the biggest gap on this page. The distinction to hold onto: a basic calculator follows fixed rules, so it is automation; a chess program that improves from past games is learning, so it is AI. |
| 4 · Ethics in AI | ● Helps a lot | Research bias, privacy and AI decision-making, work five “What Would You Do?” scenarios, write your own ethical guidelines, and explain the Turing test. Room 4 builds bias from the data up — you stack the examples and watch the guess follow — and teen Stations 05 and 10 cover bias and privacy. The scenarios and guidelines are yours and your counselor's. For the Turing test, our glossary has the closely related Eliza effect but not the test itself. |
| 5 · Deepfakes | ● Helps a lot | Explain what a deepfake is, how it affects a person, and what to do if you or someone you know is hit by one. Room 6, teen Station 08 and the grown-up Spot the Fake page all cover this, including the what-to-do part. |
| 6 · Developing AI skills | ● Helps a lot | Six parts: how AI learns and its limits, five ways to communicate with it, why prompt engineering matters, three clear instructions for a school task, the “Clear Communication Challenge”, and teaching the AI something you know well. The strongest match on the site. Room 3 is the learning-and-limits half; Room 5 and teen Station 06 are the prompting half; and for older Scouts the grown-up Three Questions framework plus Under the Hood on why a prompt changes the output at all. The Challenge itself comes from Scoutly. |
| 7 · Practical application | ◐ Helps with part | Do one of two things. Either build a real AI project — objectives, data needs, ethical considerations — or design and teach a short lesson on AI to your patrol. For the lesson, every kids room runs on a screen in Presentation Mode, built for exactly that. For the project, the planning half is what you want, what correct looks like, what it can't know; use a real AI tool, with your counselor's OK, for the build. |
| 8 · Career exploration | ○ Not covered here | Do one of two things. Either research three AI or automation careers and dig into one — training, certification, cost, salary, prospects — or interview someone working in the field. Not covered here at all; Scoutly and your counselor are the right starting point. |
Requirements summarized from the official page and the note to counselors, checked 1 October 2026. Summarized, not quoted, and they change — read the current text before you count anything as done.
Scoutly is the tool the badge is built around, and it should be your first stop. It is trained only on official Scouting America documents, which is exactly why it is trustworthy for requirement questions.
What is worth noticing is that Scouting America's own note to counselors describes how it works, in plain terms:
It “generates responses probabilistically, meaning it does not pick the single ‘correct’ next word, but one of several likely options.” Ask the same question twice and the answer can change. “Check all answers for correctness.”
That is the whole of this site in two sentences, and a Scout can watch it happen rather than take it on faith. Room 1 has you predict the next word before the machine does, so you feel what “one of several likely options” means. Room 3 has you ask the same thing twice and watch the answer move. Under the Hood is the grown-up version of why.
Scoutly tells you what the requirement says. This site shows you why the answer wobbled.
Room 4, Room 6 and teen Stations 05, 08 and 10 project well for group discussion of ethics and deepfakes. Every room runs in the browser with no logins, and nothing a Scout types is collected or sent anywhere — see how privacy works here.
Spotted a requirement mapped wrong? Email robert@completeideas.com — corrections are welcome and quick to make.