The first semester has ended. It is a rush, busy, and intense semester that sometimes I just could not handle it well. It was also the first semester I got in contact with CAS and is quite new for me. From initiating, to investigate, then to accomplish it, I feel like I have become more familiar with the CAS program over this semester and starting to gain the confidence to accomplish further things in CAS from now. CAS develops me to be a better person, not only benefit myself but also the others which include giving back to the community. It helps me to view things from various perspectives and to look at the world we live in differently. Thus, I am motivated and proud of the work that I have done in CAS throughout this semester.

At the start of the program, I decided to work on the activity part of the CAS experience as I am more comfortable with finding an area that I can improve on. Moreover, I have already thought of something that I could be improving on that can largely benefiting me at that point that also fulfills the requirement to be a CAS experience. Therefore, I chose to work on a specific skill that I can improve on in volleyball because I am more familiar in this area and I believe it will be more beneficial for me to start out with something familiar in order to truly understand the program. During this CAS experience, the biggest challenge I faced was finding evidence of improvement because there are several factors that can affect the result of the evidence of my improvement. Nonetheless, I overcome this challenge by recording videos and use them to be my evidence of improvement and I think this work out pretty well. As a result, the “activity” CAS experience went pretty successfully and makes me feel more comfortable during further CAS experience during the following weeks.

After accomplishing the first CAS experience, I began to work on the “creativity” and”service” category of the program. These 2 categories are more unfamiliar to me because it requires me to actually step into things that I might not face in my life before. For example, I decided to work on marimba mallet selection for my second experience and it was something I have not done before since my instructor always helps me to choose the best combination of mallets for a specific piece. I think this experience fulfills the principle of being a risk-taker and an open-minded person in the IB learner profile. I started to try new things for this program and being creative to come up with ideas in order to fulfill a sense of creativity in my experience. It is a tougher experience for me but ultimately, it was another successful experience that helps me on getting to know things around me on a deeper level. Furthermore, the “service” CAS experience I have accomplished this semester lies at the very end of the semester. It was also a MUN experience and it was the first time I decided to initiate this type of conference. By being an admin for the conference, I get to help people that were in need of my committee in order to make the whole discussion and conference work more efficiently and better in many aspects. It was a big take for me to step into an unknown area which is completely new to me. However, I was able to accomplish a lot of things throughout the conference and helped lots of people which I truly sense the joy to be able to help people when they really needed it. It develops me as a thinker and communicator to be able to be cooperative with the team and everyone at the conference.

Lastly, I am glad that I get to accomplish each category of the CAS experience this semester which I feel comfortable to be on the right track to keep a pretty good balance in accomplishing different kinds of CAS experience in this program.  After working on this program for a semester, I began to discover the meaningful elements of this program and looking forward to achieving more goals in the future.

During this weekend, KAS hosted a Model United Nation event and I get to experience this type of event for the first time in my lifetime. I have never been involved in such a MUN event because I did not have the time to actually put effort into investigating it in the past few years, which I feel more excited about this event. I was involved in the conference with the position of admin which my job is mostly helping the committee to run more efficiently with high-quality teamwork and job distributions. It was a fun and meaningful experience as I get to know more about the Model United Nations more such as the global issues being discussed and the skills that can be developed through such event. Although it was a tiring weekend and lots of effort were put into in when there are lots of other school works going on as the semester is ending soon, I feel like it is still worth it to be part of the event and to be involved in something new that can also be consider as one of the CAS experience. I did learn things from it especially from helping people during the conference found out the importance of cooperation and teamwork between connections of people around the world.

Over the past 2 weeks, I have been working on filming videos about my performance on marimba with different mallets. It is a new challenge for me because it is my first time to actually use more advancing equipment to record a music video. As I had mentioned in the previous post, I will be using a special microphone to assist me in recording a better sound quality music video called “RØDE VideoMic Pro” in this CAS experience. The usage of this advanced microphone went quite successful as it is able to record more detailed sounds and make the sound of the marimba smoother and more realistic. The filming process of this CAS experience went successfully and I am able to use this CAS experiment to identify the difference of sounds between mallets throughout my recordings. Overall, I feel like MKA-S7 is the most suitable combination specifically for this piece Bach: Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, Prélude, nonetheless, this CAS experience really helps me with having a better sense of how the mallets sound and ultimately improve my marimba performance in the future.

Here are the video recordings for this experience:

The 2019-20 Volleyball ACAMIS tournament has ended just at the end of October. It has been a great session and I am even more thankful to be able to play with every single person in the team. Although the result did not meet our ultimate goal, I am still grateful I was able to give all I have in volleyball throughout the tournament. I had a great tournament and had a lot of great memories. I met some of my old friends from the last ACAMIS tournament and made some amazing saves throughout the game. The only disappointing part of the tournament is that we did not achieve our initial-set goal, which is to win back our first ever champion for the school.

It is somehow disappointing that I did not get a chance to make a “pancake” during the tournament. The reason for that is because I did not want to take any risky try that could possibly lose a point in such an important tournament. I become more mature in the mental aspects to be better on being more “high-pressure resistance” throughout games. Moreover, I realize the importance of how mental resistance connects to physical performance in sports and it is such an essential factor that could alter the performance of an athlete during games. Thus, I became aware of the reality of an athlete. It is hard and intense. Although you put so many efforts during practices, the final performance in the game is still the ultimate determination of how people see you. Whether you practice or not, your performance in the game is still the determining point to make you shine or not.

Continue on with my second CAS experience, I will be selecting various kinds of mallets to perform the piece, ultimately to find out the most suitable combination of mallets. I will be choosing from a specific group of mallets that are made by a composer named “Keiko Abe”. Although the mallets she made are all in white, the ribbons on each of the mallets symbolize different softness of the mallets which directly affect on the sounds that the mallets could produce on marimba.

Unfortunately, I do not have every pair of mallets made by Keiko Abe since some of them are quite similar and create only little contrast. Therefore, I will be choosing 4 pairs of mallets to play the same piece and find the most suitable one specifically for that piece, but also having the sense to determine the sounds that different mallets could produce on marimba. The 4 pairs of mallets are each named: MKA-04(yellow ribbon, hard), MKA-06(green ribbon, medium-hard)), MKA-S7(light/dark blue ribbon(medium-soft), and MKA-09(purple ribbon, soft).

I am still deciding whether I should play a section of a long piece or just dedicated it in one short piece. At this point, the initial desired piece that I will be playing is Bach: Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, Prélude. Thus, I will be finding the most suitable mallets to play for this piece, ultimately identifying and determining the sounds of different mallets which benefits me on further investigation on marimba performance.

As I completed my first CAS experience about volleyball pancake, I started to get more familiar with the CAS program and has the enthusiasm to accomplish more things beyond this point. In my second CAS experience, I would like to accomplish something in the Creativity part of the program, which conclusively I chose to work with an instrument that I am really familiar with, marimba.

Marimba is a percussion instrument, very similar to a xylophone but larger in size. I have been playing this instrument since I was 4, which I am very familiar with how to play the instrument and actually perform it in front of the audience. For this experience, I would like to play a single piece several times and each time with different kinds of mallets in order to find out the most suitable mallets for that piece. Thus, to have a better sense and perception of different mallets in further performances on marimba.

In order to make it a good quality recording, I will have to record the sound not just with any interior microphone in a phone, instead, I would use a more advanced microphone that specifically helps to record the sound with better quality. I choose to work with the microphone called “RØDE VideoMic Pro”, which this type of microphone is designed for better audio recordings. After having the equipment ready, I will start working on selecting the mallets in the following week!

The Introduction of RØDE VideoMic Pro:

Continue on with my experience with volleyball pancake, I have been practicing this specific skill during team practices for approximately a month now. I am confident to say that I am way more familiar with the “pancake” skill than I was before the start of this CAS experience. I feel enthusiastic about making solid progress on it and being confident enough to apply this skill in a game.

After some fundamental works and few precise attempts on enhancing this skill (see an example on the video of the previous post), I evaluated the things that could be done even more effectively and revised the practice to make it more beneficial on improving this specific skill. For example, I found out that the skill has to be utilized at a suitable range, not too close and not too far. Setting that particular range is significant because it creates a more comfortable motion on diving the ball rather than having some awkward motions when the ball is too close to the body. Moreover, it helps to make the entire motion more smoothly and more essentially, help to increase the chance to actually dig up the ball for further continuation of the play.

In addition, I decided to wear the elbow protection while practicing pancake skills. It can lower down the risk to get injured, which is essential especially on during such advanced skill that creates more direct contact with the floor. Also, the elbow protection is able to limit the friction between the skin and the floor which help to make the continuation of motion more completely.

As a result, I have successfully displayed a complete motion of the pancake skill and successfully dug up the ball. I reached my goal in this CAS experience, which is to “pancake” 8 out of 10 balls in a trail. It’s a meaningful and remarkable experience for me especially on completing my first CAS experience.