DP 1 was an eventful year in both my academic sphere and the realm of CAS. Now that DP 1 has come to a close, I’m in my final year of the IB, and my high school career. Despite the heavy academic workload, it will be important to maintain a balanced lifestyle during this year and continue to get involved in valuable creative, active and service endeavors. However, planning, smart goal setting and time management will be extremely important to be successful in academics, extracurricular activities and other responsibilities like university applications. This post will focus on the goals I hope to achieve in the CAS program over the course of my senior year.

Creativity

In the last few years, almost all of my creative endeavors have been based around my passion for technology. My main creative extracurricular activity was serving as the Head of Technology for Colombo Model United Nations in the last couple of years. However, although I thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with COMUN and learnt a lot through it, I will not continue to be Head of Tech for a third year. The primary reason for this decision is the fact that this job takes a lot of time and hard work, and I feel I cannot devote so much time to COMUN in my senior year as a result of the heavy academic workload and other responsibilities. However, since I have a lot of resources for and knowledge on running technology at COMUN, I will be happy to help out/advise this year’s COMUN Head of Technology.

In addition to COMUN, another one of my key creative activities was leading the tech crew at the various SAISA events that were hosted at OSC. Last year, we hosted SAISA Girls Volleyball and SAISA Art and in both cases I managed the websites, media and livestreams. Unfortunately, OSC will not be hosting any SAISA events this year due to security concerns following the Easter Sunday Attacks, which means that these opportunities will not be able this year. However, given the situation, I feel that building a Gecko Athletics mobile app could be especially valuable since all of our varsity sports teams will be travelling away for the major tournaments. I hope to include things like scores, news and media on this app, that will have to be scraped from the respective tournament websites.

The final creative activity I hope to get involved with is the Yearbook. Last year, GeckoNet helped the yearbook team during the production process by providing a majority of the images from the key events that took place at the school. However, GeckoNet creates much more immersive content through the Gecko News segments and other video projects, which I feel can augment the whole yearbook experience. Therefore, I hope to build a mobile application that will go alongside the yearbook and use Augmented Reality technology in order to show relevant videos, and other content when the pictures from a page are scanned. For example, the app could show the COMUN recap video, when a yearbook reader uses the app to scan the pages about COMUN.

Activity

Last year, the activity aspect of my CAS program revolved around Badminton and Golf, both of which were played in a fairly competitive setting. This year however, I hope to engage in active endeavors more to improve my physical and mental wellbeing rather than to excel in a competitive environment. Therefore, I hope to continue to play golf recreationally as well as some other sports offered at school such as cricket and table tennis. Since SAISA badminton will be taking place just a few weeks before the IB exams, I don’t think I will participate in the competition, but I may participate in the training sessions. Therefore overall, my main goal in terms of activity for this year will be to keep staying active be it with Golf, or other recreational sports offered at the school over the course of the year and make sure that I participate in an active endeavor at least once a week.

Service

I served as the leader of the GeckoNetwork service group last year, and we achieved a lot of great things over the course of the year. We covered almost every event that took place in the school be it through videography or photography; we established a website that served as a platform for the community to access this content; we established a fully functional Primary arm of the service called Primary GeckoNet that covered the events that happen in the primary school; and we launched a series of micro-documentaries called “Learning by Serving” that highlight the great work done by each of the service groups at OSC. I will continue to serve as the service leader and continue with these projects over the course of this year, but I have three key goals that I hope to achieve as service leader this year. Firstly, I hope to build a chatbot for GeckoNet that will fetch content from various events on user request like Siri or Google Assistant. My second goal is to take the tech talent at GeckoNet outside of the OSC community by sharing our knowledge with those who can really benefit from it like the students at the E.A.S.E. foundation. My final goal for service this year, will be to identify and train a good successor to take over the reigns as the leader of GeckoNet. This year will be the third year since GeckoNet began serving the OSC community, and I hope it continues to add value to the community for many years to come. A large part of this aspiration lies in selecting responsible, and talented leaders that will passionately deliver on the GeckoNet vision and mission.