31st March 2015 was a very special day for Grade 10 students of the Upper School of the International School of Belgrade. Students exhibited and celebrated their MYP Personal Projects with the school community.
It was wonderful to celebrate the students’ achievements, as well as the working process, which is as important as the final result.
That evening throughout the moments of celebration we reminded ourselves of all the components and stages of the seven month long process, its requirements, the supervision, Personal Project components, similarities and differences with the DP Extended Essay, and all of the students’ efforts that were put in outside of the regular school hours.
The MYP Personal Project represents a student’s culminating experience with the IB Middle Years Program.
Thirty Grade 10 students identified their personal interests in August 2014, as an initial stage of this task. Topics chosen showed a huge variety of personal interests, such as creating a project on – how to produce electricity by walking; designing an „Everything“ chair; organizing a basketball camp for students of the Lower School; writing a book for children to better understand the lives of children diagnozed with cancer; writing an appeal to the German government regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; creating, writing, composing a theme song; devising a tourist guidebook for young foreigners visiting Serbia; combining Japanese culture and Egyptian culture in painting.
Thoughout the process it was quite impressive how the MYP students were able to familiarize themselves with lots of documentation, timelines and assessment criteria; and how they made a variety of different decisions, took responsibility to act independently, managed their time to meet deadlines, developed specifications for the products, worked to further develop the project stages, kept the journal, met and discussed challenges with their supervisor, put their topics of interest into relevant global contexts, and submitted drafts, journals, products and final reports.
Branka Sreckovic Minic
IB DP coordinator / SBC IB online / MYP Personal Project coordinator
