My imagination is more vivid than life.

• 50 cent

Project outline⌗

IPARD⌗

Investigation⌗

September 2023⌗

There was a widespread complain about the school building’s design. More specifically, people regarded it as boring (and they still do). But how could they otherwise describe a bunch of squares and rectangles filled merely with white color and shades of grey? The answer is rather straughtforward…

We wanted to come across this disappointment and beautify the school a bit. With the help of our CAS coordinator, we cooked the idea of interior design of the sorts. Our aim was to prepare prettty decorations for various occasions and hence make the building more interesting and appealing to the people of our school.

Preparation⌗

October 2022⌗

First and foremost, our project required determining what events are worth decorating school for. Some answers were straightforward - Christmas and Easters were must since they are multinational celebrations. It was Poland-specific holidays that were problematic. For example, there was a question whether we should focus on All Saints’ Day or Halloween. However, since one of our school’s aim is to be as international as possible (we are in International Baccalaureate after all), we decided to keep with more global events such as Halloween.

Another advantage of our project was that we didn’t have to outline a long-term plan for our actions and split roles explicitly. All we needed to do was to set a specific date and deliver our part of decorations (didn’t matter - handmade or bought). Everyone could do whatever they wished, therefore, there was a lot of space for imagination and creativity (about which more in the Reflection section).

We were ready with the logistics part before we October 31, notorious Halloween.

Action⌗

As mentioned, although events were different, course of action was rather repetitive. As an event was approaching, our leader would remind us about our duty and kindly encourage us to start thinking and preparing decorations. Usually, some propositions (inspired by Pinterest, TikTok and other similar platforms) would emerge in our group chat so that we could choose decorations that were the most exciting to us.

Basically, we had a chance to do whatever we wanted as long as we could deliver it on time. Fortunately for those who struggle with deadlines, there was a lot of flexibility and if you didn’t manage to bring anything at a specific time, you could make it for the next day.

After enough decorations were gathered, we could start hanging them around the school (using tape and scissors).

Here’s a more detailed list of festivities with the emphazies on my contribution:

October 2022, Halloween⌗

I prepared spider web and spiders. Even though it was tedious to cut the spider web from paper and I made six-leg spiders (good luck with finding such spiders in real life), I am proud of the effect.

December 2022, Christmas⌗

I brought a lot of decorations from my house (all I was able to find in my attic). Listening to reason, we decided that it was not reasonable to leave all of them at school such as Christmas bulbs. However, I proposed making photo booths (look at the cover of this blog post).

February 2023, Valentine’s Day⌗

It was an unusual course of events, creating decorations for Valentine’s Day. Why? I invited my family to participate in - my mum, brother, and grandparents. Together, we made to lovely chains of hearts and hearts themselves. I am glad I could do that.

April 2023, Easter⌗

Since the substantail part of our group did not contribute to the Valntine’s Day decorations, it was their role to catch up and make something nice for Easter.

Reflection⌗

Once again in the IBDP, I had an amazing opportunity to try something new that I would have never picture myself doing. It may sound a bit cliche, but, at the end of the day, how often do students decorate schools? Once, twice a year at most. Besides, there was no censorship imposed on our choices of knick-knacks, which was great! Of course, had we done something highly inappropriate, it would have certainly been reported, but it was not the case and everyone enjoyed our efforts.

As far as I’m personally concerned, I liked the idea of creating. Much as in programming, with the interior design I could craft new and innovative things. Moreover, I had a chance to work on my manual craftsmanship which went a bit rusty since the last time I could improve it.

Admittedly, sometimes it was hard to get people to have their things done - especially at later stages. However, they eventually did their work and the effect was outstanding.

Overall, I believe it was a fantastic journey and I highly recommend that other classes would continue on our project (even though, we - the initial authors - may be too overwhelmed with our senior year’s deadlines and uni applications).

Demonstration⌗

Our demonstration was ongoing, that is, you could see the results for each event separately - Christmas, Halloween, Easters etc. Together, they constitute our final outcome of the project, which you can view in different parts of this blog post.