The scout thing is totally new to me as well, I never did it as a kid. This particular group found our section by contacting NAR, who directed them our way. I gather this is fairly common.
Some of this will be different for you if you're actually the merit badge counselor. In our case we were working with a couple people who were running the merit badge. But these were some of my top level organizational thoughts.
A useful thing that we did not push hard enough to achieve is to make contact with the scout leaders that will actually be executing the rocketry activities. That's as opposed to an overall event coordinator or troop organizer, if they are different---they were in this case, as rocketry was just one activity amid a whole weekend. If we'd gotten through to them we could have solidified some plans beforehand rather than adjusting day-of, to everyone's benefit. For example, we happened to have a couple historical models on hand that they were eager to discover and incorporate into the little lectures they were giving the scouts. If we'd talked with them directly beforehand we could have let them know we'd have stuff like that, and could bring more if we knew.
Probably the biggest thing to watch out for and assert some experience on is the schedule and the logistics of the launches. The scouts' incoming plan in this case was to prep & launch rockets one at a time using just one or maybe a couple basic launchers. It was going to take a long long time to launch all the kids' rockets, much longer than they were thinking. With our section's racks we were able to have a whole bunch of scouts setup their rockets on the pads at the same time, and then quickly move through launching them one after another. People that aren't actively into rocketry won't realize such launchers exist, and also probably won't properly account for how much time it'll take to setup launches one after another. Daylight is another scheduling consideration that organizers not actively into rocketry might not evaluate well.
The other big thing to try to make input on is the launch site. There's a lot of tradeoffs here that people outside rocketry might not evaluate well---
- Need to orient the launches to make the downfield as big as possible;
- Ideally as far away from trees and such as is feasible;
- Need to be able to get cars right near the launching area;
- Need to be a safe distance from groups of people
- Need to be not so far that there won't be any spectators;
- Etc.
I'd also make sure there are enough extra supplies on hand. In our case, the scout leaders hadn't done rockets in decades. They had 48 scouts signed up, so they got two Estes 24 packs of rockets and motors. That actually worked out ok, in particular those boxes have some extra igniters in them. But I was glad to have extra motors and igniters on hand just in case. It's worth confirming what motors they'll be using---not everybody carries around 1/2As like these rockets were based on. I'd also try to get a couple extra kits. It would be a bummer for a young scout to not get to fly because they dropped & stepped on a fin canister or something like that. Similarly, it'd be ideal to have something on hand for scouts and other spectators not enrolled in the program to do. We had a bunch drop by, and let them load some basic rockets of their choice from our collection.
Other advice is to break everything down and go step by step. Once each wave of kids had built their rockets w/ their scout leaders, we had them come over to us by the launch controls. We gave them a little speech introducing our LCO and basic range safety rules, showed them how a rocket hooks up on the pads, and launched it. Then we took them all back behind the firing line and very deliberately had them all put in motors, and then put in igniters, and then put in the plugs, in sequence. We gave them the speech about range safety again, then two of us made a human gate quickly checking the motor installation before they headed out to the pads. A bunch of us then floated around helping them get the pads set and double checking clips. In the afternoon as things got hotter and scouts got more distracted we had some failures to ignite, but in the morning waves we had almost none.
As far as displays go, not much is needed other than a bunch of different kinds of rockets. Walt made some basic boards with examples of different motor sizes and some other basic concepts, and I would not really do much more than that.
