Help completing Criterion A  

 
Words: 500 -800 words 
Due date: Friday, November 3rd  
From the handbook: pages 7-13  
 
Criterion A: Knowing and understanding 
Level 1‑2  Level 3‑4  Level 5‑6  Level 7‑8 

states a goal and context  outlines a basic and  defines a clear and  defines a clear and highly 
for the project, based on  appropriate goal and  challenging goal and  challenging goal and 
personal interests, but this  context for the project,  context for the project,  context for the project, 
may be limited in depth or  based on personal interests  based on personal interests  based on personal interests 
accessibility       
 
identifies basic prior learning  identifies prior learning and  identifies prior learning and 
identifies prior learning and  and subject-specific knowledge  subject-specific knowledge  subject-specific knowledge that 
subject-specific knowledge, but  relevant to  generally relevant to the  is consistently highly relevant 
this may be limited in 
some areas of the project  project  to the project 
occurrence or relevance       
  demonstrates adequate  demonstrates substantial  demonstrates excellent 
demonstrates limited research 
research skills.  research skills.  research skills. 
skills. 
 

Task specific clarifications: 
 
 
 

Student justifications:  Teacher Justifications: 
 
 
 
 
Strand One: Define a clear goal and context for the project, based on personal interests 
Strand Two: Identify prior learning and subject-specific knowledge relevant to the project 
Strand Three: Demonstrate research skills 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Samples 
 
Personal Project: Example 1 - creating an original pop melody 
Part A: Investigating 
 
The goal of my personal project is to create an original melody displaying the transformation of 
pop music through American history. The medley will be composed of the number one American 
pop songs from 1955 to 2012, and I will perform and publish it on Youtube. I will also include an 
mp3 version of my medley and a copy of its chords and lyrics for viewers to download. As a 
young adult, I feel like many of my peers love music but do not explore more than what is current. 
I am guilty of this as well, thus for my personal project I wanted to explore music’s past and 
discover what our current music evolved from. I aimed to expose music from past generations to 
the current generation and bring back reminiscent memories to those whose generation has 
passed. 
 
Rationale 
My personal project goal initially stemmed from my passion for music. I started playing the piano 
at a very young age and recently gained the confidence to sing in front of an audience. I truly 
enjoy every aspect of music. I chose to focus on pop music because, as well as enjoying it, society 
has the most influence upon it. Pop music is defined as music created deliberately with the aim 
of appealing to a wide audience, namely teenagers, thus creating commercial success. I 
personally feel that pop music is very successful with my generation because it presents ideas 
that are relatable to its audience. As a teenager, I think that a relatable message in a pop song is 
very important to its success no matter what the generation is, and I was curious to see how 
music changed as generations passed. My knowledge on the history of music is also minimal, so I 
thought this project would be a great opportunity to become more educated on artists of 
di erent decades and become more aware of the predecessors to today’s music. I also love 
sharing new music discoveries with others, and I would be able to share music with a diverse 
audience by creating my medley. 
 
Global Context 
I have chosen to focus on the global context of an inquiry into personal and cultural expression. 
My project specifically deals with the ways in which we discover and express feelings, culture, and 
values and the ways in which we reflect on, extend and enjoy our creativity. Music is about 
emotion and reflects culture and values at the time it is created. My project will express a wide 
variety of values in Western culture because it covers a wide time span. Especially with my focus 
on pop music, my medley will provide an insight into what has been popular in society and how 
this has changed throughout generations. As I create my medley I will be extending my creativity 
and incorporate the creativity of past music artists. At the end of my personal project I will be 
reflecting on my creativity and throughout the entire project I will be enjoying my creativity, 
especially after I have created my project. 
 
 
Selection of Sources and Application of Information 
I had five basic stages during my personal project: looking for inspiration, collecting number one 
songs, creating the medley, performing the medley and editing the video. I used a di erent 
source to help me complete each stage. 
a) Looking for Inspiration 
I watched a lot of Youtube videos for inspiration. I have yet to find a video which is the same as 
my project, however there are many videos where people have created medleys and then 
performed them in one take. My actual inspiration for this project was a video featuring a 
guitarist from the Chicago Music Exchange performing 100 Rock n’ Roll guitar ri s in one take. I 
was in awe of how he fit so much history into the space of 12 minutes, and I thought it would be 
interesting to attempt a similar project involving history. After this I watched Youtube star F.G.’s 
“32 songs in 8 minutes” and many other inspiring videos. I also gave out a short survey to my 
classmates asking which musical artists they believed were influential. This gave me a better idea 
of my generation’s view of pop music. These all served as inspirations for me to strive to create a 
unique medley. 
 
b) Collecting Number One Songs 
I used a book to collect the total weeks the songs each spent at number one. I also used the 
o cial Billboard site and a site made by B.B., a man interested in pop society, to collect my 
number one songs. I crosschecked my information between these two sites. 
 
Originally I was only going to use the book; however I realized that the song which spent the most 
weeks as number one was not necessarily the number one of the year. This is because Billboard 
uses specific criteria when naming the number one hit each year, such as performance on other 
charts for example: adult contemporary, radio play and etc. In fact, there were three songs that 
never made it to the number one spot on the weekly Hot 100 chart but were considered the top 
songs of the year. I compiled all of the number one songs into a table with the artist name and 
number of weeks spent at number one. I then used this chart to select songs for my medley. 
 
c) Creating My Medley 
I used lyrics websites, guitar tablature websites and each hit song to compose my medley. The 
tab websites provided me with chords for almost every song in my medley. The main tabs source I 
used was tabsultimate- guitar.com. Because all the chords on the sites are provided by people 
who want to contribute, they are inaccurate. I thus had to come up with a few chord progressions 
on my own or try to find small sections of songs o ered in online sheet music previews. In 
general, I found that Youtube tutorials were the most reliable source, but unfortunately they were 
also the most time-consuming to learn from. My medley consisted of two drafts, the second an 
edit so my medley would be shorter. 
 
d) Performing my Medley 
I filmed this medley using an HD camcorder and scrolling video made on Final Cut Pro. This 
scrolling movie included the lyrics and chords of my medley. This was how I followed, displaying 
my medley score without manually scrolling through a document. I also used an audio recorder 
which I then laid over my video. 
 
e) Video Editing 
I used Final Cut Pro to edit my footage and uploaded it via Youtube.com to share my creation. I 
used the Final Cut Pro website to help me change the export settings of my video so that I could 
upload it to Youtube more e ciently. I also created a survey distributed with my video, asking 
about its impact on the audience’s knowledge about pop music.  
 
 
 
Personal Project: Example 2 - building a model rocket 
Investigating: My Idea (Why Rockets?) 
 
The inspiration for my topic has come from years of fascination. Since I was of a very young age 
I’ve had an increasing curiosity for the universe and what lies outside our atmosphere. Pursuing that 
curiosity, I have read many di erent books and watched numerous documentaries, enhancing my 
knowledge of our universe as well as creating more of this urge to discover and inquire. Back then, my 
dream was to become an astronaut and travel to space myself, but more recently, I have been gaining 
an interest in what happens behind the scenes at companies such as NASA, the ESA, and SpaceX, and 
have been fascinated by what the aerospace engineers do. 
 
Whilst pondering for a good idea, I began veering towards a topic with relations to the subject 
of space. Many di erent ideas came into light, but I ultimately decided to investigate the challenges 
that aerospace engineers face when they build rockets, and this would be done through the creation of 
my own model rocket. I knew I would encounter a wide variety of di culties in my rocket, so it would 
help me imagine how much more di cult it is to construct rockets that have to escape the atmosphere 
and survive the unforgiving environment of space. 
 
The construction of a model rocket was not the only product that I pondered about, as 
numerous other ideas came to my head. The strongest competitor was the construction of a 
Dobsonian telescope, which I could have perhaps used to observe our moon. Although this idea was of 
a strong interest to me, it is an extremely expensive product to build, with the designs I wanted 
costing anywhere from £265 to the outrageous price of £11,200 This is because telescopes require 
specially made and shaped glass, which costs a very large amount to purchase, and an even larger 
amount to create by hand. Furthermore, I am more strongly captivated by rockets than telescopes, 
which is why I made the decision to build a model rocket. 
 
 
Global Context  
Another decision I had to make regarding my topic was which Global Context I needed to 
revolve my project around. Out of the six options, the one most suitable was “Scientific and Technical 
Innovation.” My plan was to research the basics of the science behind how rockets work—combined 
with the foundation of prior knowledge that I had on the subject—and then innovate technically 
through the creation of my own cheap, functioning, large model rocket, which would be built from 
scratch. 
 
 
Research  
When investigating the di erent topic ideas for this project, I needed to conduct some simple, 
preliminary research to ensure that I understood certain aspects of the creation of di erent products 
(in particular the rocket and the telescope). 
 
To start o with, I looked at a variety of DIY websites, to see what kind of steps would need to 
be taken in order to build the di erent products. I discovered that Instructables 
(http://www.instructables.com) is a fantastic website for the homemade creation of anything. 
Through this website, as well as others, I discovered that model rockets are much, much cheaper to 
build than telescopes, for reasons mentioned previously—such as the cost of the specially made glass. 
Furthermore, Dobsonian telescopes are much larger than model rockets, and therefore require a 
larger quantity of materials such as wood, essentially increasing the price. The total price of the parts 
for the average Dobsonian telescope appeared to cost between £250 and £400 in total.2 The prices of 
model rocket parts vary between vendors, but all of my parts were purchased for about £30, and only 
the parts of very large, high powered rockets would cost much more than that. It was easy to find the 
di erent prices online, seeing as there is a very large range of companies that sell their parts through 
the Internet (such as Estes and Apogee). 
 
The other important piece of information was to get a general idea of the di culty of building 
these products. Unfortunately, I struggled to find this information online, but my father has some 
good friends of his who used to participate in model rocketry, so I spoke to them in depth, and gained 
some valuable insight. 
 
This information aided me in the decision of what to create as a product. Speaking to the 
experienced rocketeers further increased my curiosity in that field, so I decided to pursue rocket 
building rather than telescope building. Furthermore, it is considerably cheaper to build a model 
rocket, which played a large role in my final decision on the product.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Personal Project: Example 3 ‑ improving study habits 
Investigating 
 
Introduction 
To end the MYP cycle, tenth graders had to achieve a personal project in which each student was going to 
demonstrate their personal appreciation of global contexts and how they could apply the ATL skills on their own. The topic 
could be anything we wanted and it was a completely personal decision, but students had to be aware it should be a topic 
which would make an impact on our community, and a topic which would allow each one of us a certain way of action. In 
my opinion, picking the topic was the hardest part, because you don’t really know if that topic is going to allow you to fulfill 
all of the tasks you are asked to do or if you really like the topic enough to want to work on it for more than five months. 
Nevertheless, I discovered that once I got started it was almost impossible to stop. New inquiries and obstacles were 
constantly crossing my path, but this is when everything I had learnt through the program helped me get over all of the 
difficulties until I reached what I wanted to achieve. 
 
The topic of my personal project is something that has always caused me a lot of curiosity: how each person learns. 
I have learned in biology classes that every person’s brain is slightly different, and that not all of us make connections in the 
same way, which is why each person has their own preferred way of learning something. However, what I began to wonder 
was whether knowing this could be of any use for my personal or educational life? Then, while studying for my December 
exams, I found out I wasn’t the only one stressing about how I was going to be able to learn all of the information we had to 
learn by heart, so the idea of finding a way to make studying easier for everybody came to my mind. During this time, I 
realized that throughout my years in school, no one has ever taught me how I’m supposed to study, and I think is something 
extremely important which should be taken into consideration because the only way to improve your exam results is if you 
study correctly. In the end, I made a connection between these two topics, and decided that the topic of my personal 
project would be how to improve and facilitate our students’ study habits based on their own abilities to learn. 
 
In this report I will talk about some of the process I went through in order to complete my personal project: 
specifically about the goal I set; the resources and application of information I used; the criteria I developed for my product; 
how I was able to achieve the goal; and the reflection I’ve made on my learning.  
 
Investigating: The goal 
The purpose of my personal project is to help students to improve their learning by modifying their study habits, 
taking into consideration how they should study for each subject, which is their preferred learning style, and how their 
internal and external conditions should be in order to have a good, effective, period of study. What I want to achieve is to 
make a difference in people’s study methods by informing them about the different learning styles a person can have and 
to help them recognize how their study habits should be modified to a method which fits their learning style.In order to do 
this I plan to create a web site and make informational posters and share my project with a presentation to my school 
community Students will learn that there are small but important things that affect them negatively at the time of studying, 
and that if they make a small effort to help their brain while studying, preparing before an exam is not as difficult and as 
stressful as it seems. 
 
Hopefully, the main message others are going to understand through my work is that studying can be easy once you 
find the skills you are better at, and that learning this will greatly benefit your academic life. I don’t believe our community 
gives studying the importance it deserves, and some people have given up with studying because they think that studying is 
a waste of time because they are still not going to remember anything when they enter the exam. The problem is that we 
have never been taught how to study, and maybe the methods some students use are not appropriate, so no matter how 
long they study, the information will simply not go into their heads. Some think that they don’t need to study because it is 
enough with what they have learnt in class, but there are going to be exams for which you will have to study correctly if you 
want to get good results or even pass, and those are the exams we are going to face soon. 
  
As a result, the impact I want my project to have is to help students obtain better academic results by changing 
their study habits so they can be more relaxed at the time of studying for exams and then be able to take them in a more 
confident way. The thing about studying is that it is not only learning things by heart, it consists also of understanding what 
you are studying, and that is easier if you know which your learning abilities are. 
 
A very important part of my goal is to make sure that this project contributes to all of the community and not only 
to the students of this time, which is why the main goal is to be able to include in the curriculum at least one class per 
section in which students are taught how they should study and how their learning style affects their studying methods.  
 
 
Research skills: Selection of sources and application of information 
I used different sources for my investigation in order to develop my project. The first one was my prior knowledge 
on the topic. When I was 13, I attended a course on neurolenguistics, so I knew a bit about the fact that people learned in 
different ways and that there are different things we can do to help our brain to memorize things. I had prior knowledge 
from my classes in biology, where I also learned based on experience when we did a test to determine our multiple 
intelligences. From the media (different blogs and online news paper articles) I found that there are different places in the 
world where they have included teaching their students how to study based on learning styles 1, which was useful to plan 
ways to include the same thing here at the xxx. Some schools use things like breakfast clubs, so students can come in in the 
morning and make different exercises to improve their learning styles. Other schools, like XXX University, has a link in their 
official webpage where students can find small tips on how they can study, which was what gave me the idea to make a 
webpage to include the link in the school’s webpage. 
 
From interviews with tenth grade students, I found out that most students have lost the “respect” for studying, and 
they said that “studying isn’t worth it because either I revise or not, I won’t remember anything the next day and I will do 
bad in my exams”, which lead me to look for ways in which the students would find studying as something important again 
(telling them for example, that if they study following the tips there’s a bigger chance that they could improve their grades). 
Others said that the way they studied depended on the subject they were going to study, which was something that lead 
me to another area of inquiry: How should we revise for each subject? 
 
I then asked some of my teachers how should we revise for their subjects and they told me that basically the most 
important thing to revise was clarifying the concepts with a book or with the teacher, and once students do this, they have 
to make several exercises about the topic they are studying and a summary if it’s convenient. I also made a survey as a 
source of information and the results were very satisfying because they gave me evidence to support the fact that students 
haven’t been taught how to study. 53% of secondary school students who answered my survey claimed that they had never 
been taught how to revise for their exams, and 92% answered that they would be interested to know how to study based 
on their abilities. I also used observations and experiences, because I have a friend who studies only while listening to her 
repeating things over and over again, but once I tried it and it didn’t work for me. 
 
The other half of my investigation was from Internet pages, but I only chose the links that seemed reliable. I found 
links with tests to determine your learning style2, which was very useful because determining your learning style is the base 
for my project. I also found scientific researches on things like which type of music is allowed while studying3, 
characteristics on each learner4 and descriptions on how each learner learns best5, from which I took some of the ideas of 
the material I had to include in my final webpage. 
 
All of these sources helped me in a way to advance in my inquiry and made me reflect on how the outcome of my 
project was going. In this stage of the process I used a lot of ATL skills, but specially the information literacy skills. Some of 
them included accessing information to be informed and inform others (survey and webpage), collect research from a 
variety of digital sources, make connections between a variety of resources (all of the sources), utilize media to obtain 
perspectives (survey and interviews), process data and analyze results (analyzing the survey results and making the graphs), 
communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences and actively make connections between different 
media resources in presentations. By doing this, I concluded that maybe a booklet wasn’t the best idea for my final product, 
and that a web‑page would’ve been more useful and efficient, because the easiest quizzes to find out your learning styles 
are found online, and because taking into account all of the things I had to include in my product (What are learning styles 
and their importance, which are the types of learning styles, how should each type of learner revise and key tips for 
studying), it would be too much information in a booklet.  
 
 
1http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/profdev064.shtml  
2http://www.howtolearn.com/learning‑styles‑quiz  
3http://www.mindthesciencegap.org/2012/10/08/does‑music‑help‑you‑study/  
4http://www2.eit.ac.nz/library/ls_guides_learningstyles.html  
5http://www.bcps.org/offices/lis/models/tips/styles.html