Teachers make end of IB course special for students
INTERNATIONAL BACCALAUREATE students were treated to a magical mystery tour on Wednesday for their final school day.
For much of the two years they have worked towards their qualification, they have had to cope with the pandemic.
With no exam to conclude the course, teachers wanted to treat them to a big send off, IB co-ordinator Paul Montague said.
‘Our IB students have worked incredibly hard through two lockdowns and had a really rough time, so we wanted to plan something fun for them,’ he said.
‘They had no idea where they were going and had four stops. One was at St Saviour’s Community Centre for an escape room. The second was in Town meeting Ben Tustin from Guernsey Seaweed. Then, at Lihou, we used What3Words [a navigation and location app] to collect flags, before all groups met up at school for a cream tea.’
Marks for IB are assessed on coursework, which is marked externally, whereas A-levels will be marked from teacher-assessed grades. The first IB exam would have been sat yesterday.
Ieva Tulie, 17, said the day started with cryptic riddles.
Carys Batiste said: ‘Basically, we got a text from our group chat with teachers to say a phrase at Vinyl Vaughan’s. So I went in and said “I’m here for rumours” and they looked at me funny before saying “Oh!” and handing us all these codes.’
Amy Stinton said the codes were 10 rhyming couplets.
‘They weren’t very good Shakespeare because they were written by Mr Montague. It was very weird.’
The IB features a CAS project, which Miss Stinton said stands for creativity, activity, science.
‘Think DofE but without the expedition. There’s seven aims to do and two of them are ethical thinking and environmentalism. Using seaweed products instead of chemical ones would fulfil both of those aims.’
Mathilde Viveiros, 17, said they learned the benefits of seaweed in cosmetics and hand sanitiser.
‘The seaweed that pops is like aloe vera and is really good for your skin. Regular hand sanitiser uses a combination of alcohol and bleach because it’s cheaper.’
The St Saviour’s escape room was Alan Turing and Enigma machine-themed, Miss Batiste said, with four rooms to complete.
‘Our group came first out of our school and apparently third out of 37 groups on the island.
‘The storyline was that there was a bomb with a timer on it and we had to go to each room and look at secret documents to defuse it.
‘We spent about 20 minutes just trying to use a rotating phone – our teacher told us we put in the right code about five times but needed to put the phone down.’
Liliana Goncalves said all the teachers were really excited because the day was kept a secret.
‘I checked the email sent out to parents and even our parents didn’t know.
‘We were given a list of things we needed – and we’ve all been really excited too.’
