The 2023 PP Exhibition: A triumphant renaissance or a lacklustre return?

By Ian Chan

On April 25th, 2023, the Year 11 students of Renaissance College participated in the annual Personal Project Exhibition (PP Exhibition). This exhibition’s main goal was to showcase every Year 11’s MYP journey through their PP.

However, throughout the past three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, a multitude of different physical activities and events in RCHK have been cancelled or reworked. One of the events that was reworked was the Year 11 PP Exhibition.

As stated in the RCHK website, the Year 11 PP is a “culminating activity in the Middle Years Program (MYP), which allows students to work on a large-scale project of their initiative and creativity”. The purpose of the exhibition is for Year 11’s to be able to display the process and product of their PP Experience. For the past three years however, this exhibition has been reworked into an online event, which, according to Year 11 students at the time, was quite disappointing.

So how does this year’s PP exhibition hold up in comparison?

The PP Exhibition this year has shown to be a relative success to the students, with most students praising it. In a survey conducted to gauge the overall opinion of the students regarding the exhibition this year, most replies were positive. When asked the question, “How would you rate your PP exhibition?”. The responses recorded from the students regarding this question vary, however, it was shown that a massive majority of 42.9% of all the students had, on a scale of 1-5, placed the exhibition experience at a 4.

Graph of the responses towards the overall sentiment towards the respondents PP experience

78.6% of respondents had also reported that they felt comfortable with sharing their PP experience with other people attending the PP exhibition.

Pie chart of the responses to the question, “Did you feel comfortable sharing your PP Experience during the exhibition?”

Furthermore, the survey had also shown that students enjoyed the offline experience of the exhibition. They enjoyed a range of things from the unique dress code to being able to spend time hanging out with friends while sharing their PP experiences with each other. In fact, the most common positive that students highlighted was the ability to talk to other students during the exhibition. To quote one of the responses to the survey: “I enjoyed socialising with people in my year that I don't normally talk to.It was also interesting to see what other people made for the PP. I also liked that there was some level of freedom because we could walk around and see friends.”

Despite the overall overwhelmingly positive reviews of the PP exhibition, there were still some areas of the exhibition that were criticised by the respondents. One very commonly noted criticism that the Year 11 students had was the lack of chairs during the entire exhibition. The exhibition was a total of roughly six hours long, and the lack of chairs made it tiring for the students to constantly stand at their stalls presenting their products to others.

Criticism was also directed towards the overall length of the exhibition and the messy scheduling of the exhibition. According to the responses, the students felt that the length of the exhibition, which was six hours, was too long, and led to long periods of down time where there were little to no visitors at the exhibition. The schedule for the exhibition was also criticised. The time schedule for the exhibition worked in a manner such that specific groups of people (such as parents or teachers) would only be able to visit the exhibition at specific time frames. However, there were flaws in the scheduling and many students stated that there were times when groups of people would join during incorrect times.

This messy schedule had caused confusion amongst the students, as it made it more difficult for students to know when they were allowed to take a break from their stall. To quote one of the responses from the students:

“Though I quite liked it, I felt the exhibition was too long. The times where we were allowed to look at each other's stalls felt too short, and we had to stand by our stalls for quite a long time.”

Overall, the reception of this year’s PP exhibition was considerably more positive than that of the one hosted online during the COVID 19 pandemic. During the COVID 19 pandemic, the students' view towards the online PP exhibition and experience was quite negative. In an article regarding the 2021 online PP experience and exhibition written by Megan Chan, the article shows that the students faced limitations in their PP Experience. To quote one of the Year 11 students featured in this article:

“For my PP product, I was planning on printing a few of my art therapy journals and [was going to] hand them out to other students around ages 13-18. But because it was online, only parents were looking through the padlet, which made it hard for me to reach my target audience.”

This year, students had a much more positive PP experience and while there were still some areas for improvement for next year, this year’s PP exhibition marks a triumphant return for the event.

Sources

https://www.rchk.edu.hk/personal-project/

https://www.therchktruth.org/school-news/2021/6/6/the-myp-personal-project-distance-learning-style-the-good-the-bad-and-virtually-everything-in-between

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1nzw6qiJwnZWn_uJFAk09CcHfuCcnF5_gZQ29lmcpnEk/edit#responses