Kanza

Kanza Amanda

Project goal

In the wake of the pandemic, many schools have adapted by adopting online learning classes. Students and teachers alike needed to work together in order to create a functioning learning environment inside their homes, this was to avoid the further spreading of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19). Although online mediums have proven their effectiveness in terms of convenience and efficiency, there are cases where students are unable to learn at an optimum level due to distractions in their own respective environments. Speaking from my personal experience, learning virtually poses a degree of difficulty that mass surveys and research papers are simply unable to represent. Often, I require further individual studies to fully understand and comprehend the topic that was taught in class.

The team and I plan to help aid those students willing to deepen and strengthen their academic knowledge. Cooperating with teachers and perhaps substituting them, we plan to create a server where most academic advice is easily accessible. Establishing a learning community in the process to inspire those who feel discouraged in learning. We want to know their issues, their problems, and their feedback in order to better ourselves and convey to the teacher in the long run.

Our group believes that an online student-led tutoring session will be one of the most effective methods of teaching other students, especially seniors to juniors. Our interactions will be held online, so as to avoid the dangers of the pandemic. We will create a discord server, a well-known media application, and utilize its various unique features for academic purposes. As a side product, we also plan to create a website documenting and listing down topics we have covered so anyone can revisit previously discussed topics. This website will also act as our backup plan. In case that our server receives few direct tutoring requests, we will instead create tutorial videos and enrich our site. The topics we will cover will include mathematics, sciences, English, Bahasa Indonesia, and general skills (preview for DP subjects, courses, and [QoL] quality of life skills).

Experience description

CAS Project Strand: Creativity and Service
Duration: 1st April 2021 - 27th August 2021
Place: Online

LO 1: Commitment and Perseverance (Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences)

This learning outcome would be achieved by simply running and maintaining both the discord server and the website. Our server will act as physical evidence of our tutoring actions, while we will create a compilation and record important milestones along the way. Our commitment and perseverance will not only be shown by the evidence but also the product of our endeavors. The website, discord server, and the end of the program student reviews. As for my personal goal in this outcome, I hope to become an engaged member of the team. Able to assist my team and help make our project a success. This means being present at group meetings and taking the initiative to help the team to the best of my abilities.

LO 2: Working collaboratively (Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working, collaboratively)

This project is not a one-man task, it will require collaborative work. Working collaboratively will improve our performance in doing our project. Our project will have a multilayered management; Material research, Website Building, and most importantly the tutoring itself. Collaborative work will be required to distribute the load so as to keep CAS a project we can do without bothering our academic lives. The success of the project will be proof of our success in our collaborative work, as well as our group management. To me, this means doing my job that is stated in the job description. Working on my part to make the group project a success and reach our goal.

LO 3: Engagement with Issues of Global Significance (Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance)

As many students are having problems with their academics, we will be engaging with the issues of global significance. Research done by the University of Illinois exposed that one fatal issue with online classes is student discipline and literacy of technology. This also applies to the teachers and faculty members who aren’t used to teaching their students using the complete tools at their disposal, leading to severe inefficiencies. Our project aims to combat this global issue of learning inefficiency, especially for those students who are struggling to keep up with classes using the online medium due to unsatisfactory or inefficient teaching methods. My personal goal is to lessen the burden of the underclassmen that are planning to take the DP Programme. As someone who has felt the stresses and bundens of the DP Programme, I would like to make the experience of the programme more bearable for those who come after me.

LO 4: Ethics of Choices and Actions (Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions)

We must conduct our tutoring sessions ethically by acknowledging academic honesty. Our activities will not involve providing direct answers to the students’ questions or doing the students’ schoolwork for them. But instead, we will teach them how to come up with solutions to the problems they are facing by teaching them to solve similar problems.

Reflections

1. Reflection of Investigation Process

Date/Time: February 4, 2021

Type of Experience: Project

LOs achieved:

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

• Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

This was our very first official meeting with a supervisor for our CAS project. Our initial idea is to build a city in Minecraft. We will build a model of what we think an ideal city would and should be like. At the moment however, since we lack research, what we have is just a jumble of ideas that might be interesting enough to put into our city model.

The reason for choosing Minecraft was because we all enjoy playing the game. And since we enjoy playing the game, we thought that by adopting the game into our academic work would motivate us to do work more efficiently. That is why I'm quite excited to start this project.

Throughout the process so far, collaboration has been essential. This is because without the help of the inputs and ideas from multiple members, our planning and proposal wouldn't be as well prepared as it is currently.

One challenge was in identifying a global issue that can connect to our work. We thought that we could just make a model of an ideal city to show the community what is wrong with our cities today, and how it can be fixed. Problems arise from this however. First, a city envelops a large community. If we were to build a city, who would we show it to? We don't have connections that would allow us to actually make an impact on the community. That is why we decided on building an ideal school instead of a city so that we have the potential to make changes in our school that would benefit many others.

If I were to connect a learner profile with our project so far, it would be balanced. This is because we are able to create a middleground between academic work and leisure. By making Minecraft our academic work, we may be more motivated to do more work and make more progress in our project because it feels less like work and more like fun.

Supporting evidence: Meet recording

Date/Time: March 13, 2021

Type of Experience: Project

LOs achieved:

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

• Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skill in the process

This meeting was what changed our project for the better. In the meeting we were deciding on a fallback if our project didn't turn out well. My idea was that we create a Discord server that would be useful in a way. The other members developed my idea and thought of a server for tutoring the underclassmen at school. And so, after some consideration, we came to the conclusion that the server idea is much more viable than our Minecraft idea. Hence, we ditched our initial Minecraft idea, and continued with the new tutoring server idea. This is where I think collaborative work is really important. I had an idea and it was far from being fully fleshed out. If the other members didn't add to my initial idea, we may have gone on with the Minecraft idea.

And with that, I think we have overcome the challenges we had in our Minecraft plan. That plan didn't seem that suitable for a service kind of project, which is not good since one of our LOs involves tackling global issues. We overcame the challenge by completely changing our project. I think this was a good choice compared to forcing the Minecraft idea and struggling a lot more. I feel much more relieved after the change in idea since I feel like this choice would be much easier and doable.

I think we were very good communicators throughout the meetings. We were able to give out and listen to each other's ideas, which resulted in a good big turn in our project.

Supporting evidence: Meet recording

2. Reflection of Preparation Process

Date/Time: April 18, 2021

Type of Experience: Project

LOs achieved:

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

In this meeting, our supervisor told us about how we can make use of our project and let it have more impact to our target audience. He proposed the idea of collaborating with the teachers at school by letting us know the students who are having trouble submitting their tasks on time, and letting us help them. I think this is perfect because we have been lacking interaction anyway from the students. I think this is also possible from the fact that the nature of our project suits this purpose, so I can say I feel that choosing this type of project was a good idea after all.

Though one challenge is that the teachers can't just send us a list of the names of students who are having trouble finishing their assignments. We were suggested to wait until the students in need answer our form we sent about our project, and we let the teachers know who are the people that responded to our form, and if the students who need help sent a response to our form, the teachers would let us know whether or not we should prioritize said student in our project. This is the challenge. We were already lacking interaction anyway. And it is also unlikely for the students in need to respond to our form. This is one of my concerns when given this idea by our supervisor.

Ultimately, I think we have to be good thinkers to solve the challenges we have at the moment. Perhaps we could send out more forms for people to answer, or we could reach out to underclassmen we know personally. In the end, our goal is to help underclassmen with their school work, and we want to find as much ways as possible to do that.

Supporting evidence: Meet recording

Date/Time: May 17, 2021
Type of Experience: Project
LOs achieved:

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

• Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

• Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

We officially opened our server to the public back in April, and we acquired the first few members of our server. This is an important moment in our project as it is the beginning of everything. There were a lot of steps that were taken to reach this point, however.

Before opening the server, we went through several meetings. In the meetings, we discussed our target audience, and how we will attract people into joining our server. Our first plan was to just share the invite link to our server and hope that people join. However, that is easier said than done. It's rare to find juniors who are willing enough to interact with their seniors to get help with their assignments. Then, we thought about ways of inviting people. Our advisor suggested that we try to invite juniors who are having trouble completing their outstanding tasks, and make them our top priority on the server. So then we sent out a form to the students about it. However, we received very few responses. But even so, we kept trying. What we did next was sending another email to the MYP students, and we even received more members on our server after that. We also told the students who are already on the server to spread the word and invite their friends to join as well. Through this, I believe that my group members and I have shown the IB Learner Profiles communicators because we found ways to convey our purpose to the MYP students in various ways, and thinkers as we try to solve our problem of not having enough members.

All of this was done due to team effort. We assigned members to different roles. There were some who worked on the server. Some worked on the website. We also had different members of the group to send emails to different grades so that everybody has their own roles. Because of this collaborative work, I feel that we were able to get more done in a shorter time.

I also believe that our project is rooted on a global issue that is affecting students all over the world right now. We believe that due to COVID-19 and the shift to online learning, more students are beginning to have trouble catching up with their school assignments because some may be hesitant to reach their teachers. Therefore, from this project, we hope that by reaching out to the students as students ourselves, they are more keen to get themselves some help throughout the project.

Although we don't have a lot of members as of now, I am optimistic of our project. I am now anticipating requests and questions from the students that joined our server, and this gives me the motivation to want to learn more in order to help them.

Supporting evidences:

• Seeking out potential members for the server

• Opening server to the public

• Effort to invite more members into the server

3. Reflection of Action Process

Date/Time: May 17, 2021

Type of Experience: Project

LOs achieved:

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.

This was one of the first questions we received from the students who joined our server. The question came from a 9th grader. He wanted to know if he could get notes for the physics subject, specifically on electricity. There were two members of the group that helped answering his questions, and it was Tobi and I. Tobi is more skilled in the physics subject so he was the one mainly answering the questions. Tobi needed diagrams for his explanations. And as we prefer to give original resources as best as we can, he asked for my help to draw the diagrams digitally (as I have the equipment for digital drawing). It was a team effort. I believe collaborative work is important for this project as different members have different abilities that might contribute to different activities in the project.

As this was one of the early questions we get on the server, I feel that this is an important moment. I also feel happy to see that the juniors are starting to speak up and ask for help from us through our project.

Through this experience, I feel more of a caring and knowledgeable person. This is because I need to have that caring spirit in me to answer these questions for our juniors, and at the same time I also need to be knowledgeable on the subjects I'm helping out with in order to support them.

Supporting evidences:

• May 17, 2021 Forum

Date/Time: May 21, 2021

Type of Experience: Project

LOs achieved:

• Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

We also tried another thing to get interaction from the students in our server. Since we allow our members to give themselves a username of their liking, we didn't actually know who the members are. To solve that, we decided to send out a form asking the students for their name and grade, along with their username. So far we've only gained about 5 responses, but we posted this as an announcement in the server so we should be getting more responses soon. I believe this is a way of showing our perseverance in our project. We try various ways to get interaction with our members to solve our problem of not receiving enough tutoring requests.

I feel like this was an important step in our project. This is because we feel like if we were to get to know the members more, we thought that they might be more comfortable interacting with us.

Through this experience, I believe that I've become more of a thinker because my group members and I were searching for various ways to get interaction from the members on the server.

Like usual, I hope that in the near future, we will be getting more tutor requests and more members. If that is not the case, I think that I should work on more resources to fill up the forums and the website as well.

Supporting evidences:

• Getting to know the members

• Member registration form

Date/Time: May 21, 2021

Type of Experience: Project

LOs achieved:

Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

As we weren't getting much activity on the server initiated by the MYP students, we decided to take initiative and started adding resources to the server. Today I collected resources on essay writing that I've been using for my classes and compiled them into one folder with organized labels for ease of access. I uploaded the files into our shared project folder and pasted the link on the server. Another member from my group, Tobi, also followed the resources with explanations that would make it easier for the MYP students to understand what we are doing.

I think our collaborative work is seen here. Just like before, I collected the online resources since I'm more aware of online learning resources, and Tobi helped me out by adding descriptions to what I'm posting. I believe this also shows our perseverance in the project. We didn't get discouraged by how there weren't as many tutoring requests as we expected, but instead, we tried initiating activity on the server on our own. Lastly, we also engage with the global issue in question because we are making free resources more accessible to the MYP students.

Throughout this experience, I feel more of a knowledgeable person. This is because I'm making use of the resources I have access to and what I know about the topic and share it to the people who also need it. I also feel like a caring person as I'm doing all this for the sake of the MYP students we are trying to support.

My wish is that more students are going to interact with us on the server, otherwise I feel like we need to find other ways to invite more students to talk.

Supporting evidence:

• English resource

Date/Time: June 13, 2021

Type of Experience: Project

LOs achieved:

Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

Today I was really excited to find that a member from our server is asking for help from us. The question came from a grade 7 student (I knew this from the member registration form we sent where we asked the members to introduce themselves). The person asked a question about the math subject. They sent a problem regarding permutations and combinations. And we first asked them what they know about the topic. They said they have yet to learn the topic so we sent them resources they can start with. I believe this experience today fulfills our purpose of tackling this issue of students not being able to resolve the questions they have in class due to the restrictions in online learning. Also, as usual, I worked together with my members on answering their questions, so I believe collaborative work is very essential and beneficial.

For the past few reflections, I have been anticipating more questions from the students on our server, and today we got one. I feel more optimistic about our project.

From this experience, I think I'm showing my knowledgeable traits as I have learned the topic the student is asking about in class already in the past, and I'm now helping somebody else out with that knowledge.

Supporting evidences:

• June 13, 2021 Forum

Date/Time: August 1, 2021

Type of Experience: Project

LOs achieved:

• Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

• Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

For the past few days, we've had several discussions with our supervisor and each other. We realized that the lack of activity on the server was a bit concerning. And so, we wanted to be productive and provide material that can be useful to the members of our server. Hence, we decided to make subject guides in a different form, something that is more digestible, and that is through podcast-like audio guides. We assigned ourselves the subjects we are skilled at (I was assigned computer science along with Matthew, because we are one of the few people who take that class). Again, we can see how working collaboratively helped us do less work since we can divide jobs. For reference, my audio guide can be seen pasted in our server in figure 13.

And to make sure that we actually do the work we're supposed to do, we set deadlines for ourselves, which our leader pasted in one of the staff channels in the server (seen in figure 12). This is so that we can stay committed to our project, and it worked. All of us were able to complete our task before the deadline, and our end products are available on our website.

I feel that this activity is a great way of finalizing our project, as the project period is about to end soon. I enjoyed doing the audio guides as I love talking about the subject I'm interested in, computer science. I also like the idea of helping the future listeners with my tips if they plan on taking computer science in the future. Overall, I think my teammates and I have been very caring throughout the project. We were able to not only help students directly, but to provide materials to students who were not brave enough to speak on the server, letting us indirectly help them.

Supporting evidences:

• Setting deadlines for the podcasts

• My end product of the computer science audio guide