IB Core: The first half term of CAS

IB Core: The first half term of CAS Our year 12 students have just finished their first half term as IB students. Kean from Sd writes about his experiences at the beginning of his CAS program.

Our year 12 students have just finished their first half term as IB students. Kean from Sd writes about his experiences at the beginning of his CAS program.

So far my overall CAS experience is going pretty well if I do say so myself, I’ve completed plenty of reflections for both of my CAS experiences my reflections are getting longer and longer, which is a good thing because it means I’ve got more and more things done by each and every week I work on the project.

My first CAS Creativity experience is to create a video game, I do have past experiences creating a game before, but those games are closer to a random experimentation with ideas than a fully-fleshed out game. All the obstacles found were to be expected, such as collision problems and other small bugs. Currently I only work alone, I don’t really have any issues that I feel the need to ask for help from others and I’m not yet at the stage where I require other people’s help like playtesting and such. This is definitely the CAS activity I enjoyed most, as both making and playing video games are my passion.

My second CAS experience is for Service but also a Creativity experience. It is to Create a Minecraft server for students at “Steps with Theera” to play, this is a frustrating CAS experience, not because of the activity itself, but because of the lack of communication between everyone involved. I had to change my plans over and over because no one could agree on the same thing. Before the activity even begins, I knew what are the necessities needed to create a Minecraft server and I also knew that it would take a very long time to set up. So I started setting up the server before anyone else, installing plugins, configuring the server and creating a world map for them to play on.

There was lots of people at the first session, there are too much people to manage, but after the second it seems like people just lost interest and never came in the later session. In the end there were only me, one person who actually helps, perhaps I’m just venting my frustration I had with the activity. But despite the fact that there’s a lot of frustrating things along the way, I learned a lot from this experience, mostly about how painful a large group of creative minds can be since they wanted to use their own idea (yes, including me) – this is basically what working in a creative field would be like, I guess. Nonetheless I’m overall happy with this activity, after seeing how appreciative the students at Steps with Theera are, I feel like it is worth all of the problems I’ve endured.

I really need to start my CAS Activity so I have experiences for all 3 CAS strands, luckily I have a vague idea of what I wanted to do and I shouldn’t have any problem starting it, I’ll give some more thoughts on this matter before I complete the proposal form for it.