The International Baccalaureate (IB) Exhibition will be held on May 21 in the Blue Commons from 5:00-6:30 pm. This event is a chance for IB juniors and seniors to present a project they worked on this school year to the community.
At last year’s IB Exhibition, senior Russ Gibbs presented an LED neutralizer that connects to a piano so that playing each key illuminates the corresponding light.
“The hardest part was actually getting everything to work,” Russ said. “There were a lot of weird things going on, and I had to connect my project to a hotspot on my phone so it would boot the player. The best part was finally seeing it work because I worked on it for so long.”
This project allowed Russ to explore something new and challenge himself with new skills.
“Before I did this project, I didn’t have any experience with hardware coding,” Russ said. “I’d only done scripting before, but not anything that actually interacted with hardware, so that was pretty interesting.”
Senior Kiyana Mishima presented her Extended Essay (EE) at the exhibition last year, which was about the surface area of the F-35 and its relationship with lift and drag. This experience taught her about facing problems while working on a project.
“For my EE, I learned that you have to pay attention,” Kiyana said. “I was too optimistic about my experiment, which caused me to come across conflicts that I could have resolved early if I had just looked at it.”
The exhibition helped Kiyana understand the lessons she learned through working on her EE.
“The exhibition last year impacted me because I was able to reflect a lot on my EE,” Kiyana said. “Because I was having to put information about it on my poster board, it helped me reflect on my experiment and how I could make it better.”
At this year’s exhibition, a new group of IB juniors will present their projects. Junior Emmy Heslip plans to present her biology internal assessment (IA), in which she investigated mitosis in onion root cells.
“My project was hard because science is challenging and there’s a lot of things that could go wrong, but it was also fun because it made me feel like a real scientist,” Emmy said. “At the exhibition, I want to show people the microscope slides that I made with my onion roots because I’m really proud of them. I also want to see everybody else’s exhibits because I think that’s really cool.”
The exhibition is a chance to celebrate students, help them reflect, and share their projects with the community, factors that IB Programme Coordinator Sarah Patterson believes make it an important event for everyone.
“This is a chance for students to showcase their learning and their hard work that is otherwise unseen by the community at large,” Patterson said. “For the community, it sheds light on a great program and what students are actually able to produce from these advanced courses. It shows the variety of subject material and the depth of learning.”
Kiyana thinks the IB Exhibition is an important opportunity to share students’ projects with peers and the community.
“I think the value is showcasing what we’re doing and making to each other and our parents,” Kiyana said. “I didn’t know that Russ could play the piano before seeing his project at the exhibition, so it helped me learn a lot about my classmates, what they’re doing, and how IB is helping them pursue their interests.”
The exhibition has personally impacted senior Armin Teizer, who appreciates the opportunity to reflect on his work over the past year.
“The exhibition helps us reflect and shows that projects like the IAs and EEs actually have a deeper meaning,” Armin said. “That meaning comes through presenting projects to the community that we really enjoyed doing. Because of the exhibition, I can reflect on my work ethic and time management, which can help me develop better skills in the future.”
The exhibition is open to the community and all are invited to attend.
