Inspiring our students to explore their passions
Learning through inquiry
Learning through focused inquiry is a concept at the heart of our International Baccalaureate (IB) education programme. Our Grade 10 students complete a personal project, an extended piece of independent research, which showcases the skills they have gained whilst studying for the IB Middle Years Programme (MYP). The personal project allows them to pursue their intellectual curiosities and engage in hands-on exploration of their chosen topic. Through their project, our learners develop research skills needed in high school and beyond.
Our students’ personal projects were presented to the ACS community as part of an exhibition. Of the many projects on display, four students particularly impressed with their creativity and technical skills.
Maya Salama is passionate about space exploration and science fiction. Using the gaming software Unity, she successfully created a digitally animated virtual reality depicting future life on Mars. Maya was keen to use her personal project as an opportunity to explore beyond the curriculum and to challenge herself within a subject area that was of interest to her.
Zoe Kruger joined ACS Doha last academic year and used her personal project to visually document her experiences as part of our recent community service and volunteering trip to Kenya. Zoe, who plans to study art at university, was inspired by the beauty of the Kenyan countryside and the stories of the people she met, to transform two of her photographs into artworks. Her first painting uses watercolour as its medium, and depicts one of the female village elders, whose dedication to her community particularly moved Zoe. For her second creation, Zoe chose to explore a new medium in acrylics. This piece sought to capture the natural light and beauty of the Kenyan countryside and the and boundless enthusiasm of the children she met.
A robotics and computer science enthusiast, Iman Ouzzani built a service robot to provide navigation assistance to the elderly blind. Iman also developed a corresponding application to work in parallel with her robot. Using a software tool called Arduino, Iman set about building her device from scratch. The robot was configured to be able to detect obstacles around its user and was connected, via Bluetooth, to an application-based mapping service. Iman was keen to use her personal project as an opportunity to develop her hardware skills and encourages future learners to choose a topic area that both interests and challenges them.
Jonathan Sormin built a hydroponic system to grow plants without the need for soil. The unit used water, channelled through PVC pipes, to support plant growth within an indoor, climate-controlled and pesticide-free setting. Having lived in Qatar for over seven years, Jonathan chose to pursue this area of research as he was intrigued to learn more about the opportunities for agriculture in the desert. Like Maya, he was also interested in exploring a topic that was of relevance to future space travel: NASA currently researches hydroponics as a means of feeding future space colonies. Of the many challenges Jonathan encountered, he found the physical construction of the hydroponic unit to be particularly onerous. But, before long, he was cultivating an admirable assortment of vegetables, including lettuce, bok choy and paprika.
