BSA Announces new Merit Badges for 2010

New for Boy Scouts - Scuba Diving is the first new Boy Scout merit badge in three years; it will become available in December. Click here for a brochure about the Scuba Diving  badge. Four other new merit badges will appear over the course of the coming year:

• Inventing (First quarter 2010) 
• Geocaching (Second quarter 2010) 
• Scouting Heritage (Second quarter 2010) 
• Robotics (Fourth quarter 2010)

These badges are being introduced because they received positive feedback in a youth interest survey.  If five new merit badges seems like a lot, it is. By comparison, the BSA introduced just six new merit badges between 1992 (Collections) and 2006 (Composite Materials).  But the new badges aren’t the only innovation. In the past it took three years to create a merit badge. Now, that time has been cut to just less than a year, helping to keep the badge topics and content fresher than ever.