Building resilience during Core Week
From 7-9 October the DP1 students went on a trip to Wageningen University.The goal of the trip was to get more familiar with the requirements of the core subjects in the Diploma Programme. Building resilience was the theme of the trip, so that’s what we focused while doing all of the tasks and activities.
By Poojya, DP1 student
During our trip we thought about two of the three core subjects: CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service) and the Extended Essay (EE). At the same time we worked on our Group 4 (sciences) project.
On our first day at Wageningen University we attended a session about the Extended Essay with three students from the university who took the Diploma Programme before. Two of those students wrote their extended essay together and won an Extended Essay competition. The students gave us useful tips about forming a focused research question for our EE, after which we started brainstorming ideas for our own EE.
Twittering Trees
Then we had a campus tour and we found out that Wageningen University has some interesting features like ‘twittering trees’. These trees could tweet about their transpiration, current diameter or other interesting data, because of the sensors attached to them.
The vitamin C content of orange juice
Another goal of our visit to Wageningen University was to start working on our Group 4 project. This is a science project carried out in groups of 4 students which allows the students to explore all the three sciences through experimentation. The students formulate a research question, carry out an experiment to answer the question and come to a conclusion based on their experimental findings. The emphasis is on the experimenting and investigating.
For example, my group formulated the following research question: “What is the difference in vitamin C content between fresh orange juice, processed orange juice with pulp and processed orange juice without pulp?” To find the answer we carried out an experiment involving iodine titration and found that the naturally made orange juice contained the largest amount of concentration of vitamin C and that the processed orange juice with pulp had the least amount of vitamin C. However, the experiment was conducted in school after returning from the trip.
World hunger
After formulating the research question, we had another session with two students from Wageningen University about World Hunger and the factors affecting it.
We stayed the nicht at a hostel in Lunteren, where we played football, table tennis and games like ‘Uno’ and ‘The Meme Game’. We also had a quiz organised by two students covering various topic like history, movies and memes.
Survival tasks
The next day, we had more time to brainstorm our Extended Essay and further develop our research question and find reliable sources for our topic. The EE is an essay that needs to be completed as part of the Diploma Programme and is an opportunity for us to investigate a topic of personal interest which relates to one of our six DP subjects.
That evening we had a series of survival tasks which also helped build physical resilience. They included laser tag, an obstacle course and other activities.