Year 10 passion projects
Year 10 passion projects: self-development, skills and staying positive
There was certainly a buzz in the air at the Personal Projects Exhibition in Term 3, with a wide variety of projects, from mechanical devices, models, crafts and fashion design.
By Gavin Hanbridge
Every student in Year 10 at St Andrew’s Cathedral School is tasked with completing a project of their choice that captures their interests, talent and learned skills. Most of all, it challenges them to think in new ways and overcome challenges.
The Middle Years Programme (MYP), provides students with a way to see the connections between their otherwise disconnected subjects. It’s an essential skill for completing a self-guided project that transcends typical subject boundaries. The MYP empowers students to take on a project of significant scale.
A big part of it is staying positive throughout the project and seeing it through to the end.
Mrs Karen Hajj, Assistant Head of Mathematics Administration, said that through personal projects the School is aiming to develop the character of each student.
“It’s a really natural way to show evidence of that,” she aid. “It’s a display of what they’ve done.”
“They are encouraged to choose something they love and have fun with it.”
On one of the tables a black plastic turtle with eyes of silver slowly maneuvered its way across the surface. It’s creator Arrabella Simpson has done other robotics projects, but this time says she wanted to make an animal that could walk.
“I firstly CAD (Computer Aided Design) modelled it and then 3D printed the parts,“ she says. “There are 250 lines of code powering the robot.”
At another table in the exhibition, a continuous stream of people flicked through brightly coloured books. The difference from a usual book stall was that these books had all been made by hand, by Year 10 student Darcy Redican.
Darcy was fascinated by the process of book binding and set herself the challenge of learning how to do it. Along the way, she says she learned a lot about the history of how books have been put together.
“I went into a lot of depth on how books were made,” she says, pointing out the materials traditionally used in making books.
For Oliver Wells, his inspiration came from the cook-it-yourself restaurants he tried on a recent trip to Japan. The hibachi grill he manufactured sits gleaming in front of him.
He praised the facilities at St Andrew’s Cathedral School for assisting him to complete the project.
“There are two workshops and lots of materials and the teachers helped me a lot with designing this,” he says.