MYP Personal Project exhibition - a festival of ideas

The annual MYP personal project exhibition took place at the Aga Khan Academy Hyderabad on Saturday 19th January 2019. 80 students from grade 10 presented the products / outcomes of a learning journey that has spanned a year. Read Aditi Ismal’s account of the exhibition below. 

When there is an overdose of workload, tension in the air and future deadlines simultaneously haunting a room, it’s difficult to project a year’s worth of work, but our current MYP5 batch nevertheless managed to make this exhibition a triumph. The exhibition demonstrates the skills we have developed through the MYP, by applying these skills to a topic of our choice and that we are personally interested in. 

The exhibition also gave us a chance to showcase our talent. Projects including legal aid, the preservation and sustainability of the environment, animal conservation, humanitarian initiatives, and technology – including hand-built security systems and flying drones – were to be witnessed. These projects are not specifically driven towards discovering new things as such, but rather are geared towards creating new alternatives to existing systems. Students were asked to present their personal projects around what fascinates them, what drives them to be a better human and make their society a better place. The exhibition made us realise that what consists of an academic project today could make us an entrepreneur tomorrow. 

For example, the human powered device charger developed by Mishca Dossani. It is a very simple product yet a complex project. It involves spinning a lever that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy that then charges the battery of a phone. This makes phone charging convenient as you can do it from anywhere and you are not reliant on electricity!

Bhavana Balasubramaniam, another one of the presenters, is an advocate of body positivity and self-love, and is passionate about spreading the following message: “my body isn’t flawed, your thinking is.” As an avid blogger, she has learned to appreciate beauty in any form, shape or colour. She is also a fitness guru and has developed diet plans and exercise videos, simultaneously promoting a healthy lifestyle amongst people her age, which then leads to body positivity. 

If you know Amaan Momin, you know that the ‘A’ in his name stands for ambition. Amaan enjoys the realms of cognitive science, economics and physics. With a long term vision of becoming involved in urban planning, Amaan developed “the car of the future,” a wind-powered vehicle which uses renewable sources of energy and is more durable because of the material used. 

Like this, there were many more projects that were innovative as well as inspiring in the way they tackled a global issue. Personally, as a grade 10 student myself, I can say that the skills we gained through this project were invaluable. My communication skills improved dramatically because one of my primary sources of data included community engagement and awareness. So even though my project was based in the science and technology field, I had to interact with different kinds of people, and can see a change in the way I approach these interactions.

By Aditi Ismal, grade 10