My intention for running the Blender club is to assist the Gr. 10 students in the process of their ICT semester project of computer-generated 3-Dimensional modeling and animations, also for any others who are interested in the subject. The activity basically involves, getting to know expanse in which the program ‘Blender 3D’ can operate and the outcome of the product it renders, before moving on to the actual work which ranges from: Basic mesh modeling and texturing to adding colours and lights to enhance the end result (see below).


Many of the members accomplished these challenges competently during the course of their project. Some moved further to more challenging stages such as animation and advanced texturing which involves importing and working with external products, achieving also very positive results. I hope they all have acquired the creative potential to pursue further this form of computer aided art art within their own field of preference.

My initial inspiration for running this club was that I was one of the new members of the Blender Club last year, and without any experience of 3D arts whatsoever I was amazed by the things I could do. Firstly, it proved very helpful with my ICT project, then later on I found it to be applicable to my other subject areas and other aspects of life. By running the club myself this year I hope that all my club members acquire the same benefits that I myself have gained from the activity.

Throughout my IB C.A.S experience, I have enjoyed every single hour of each activity. Before I started the IB, I thought C.A.S was just something that I had to accomplish to be seen as a global citizen and to look good for universities applications. Now that I am done, I realize that C.A.S gave me life experiences that I would never have even thought possible. Most of the activities I have done were ones that I really wanted to do such as Rugby or stop motion video because I am really intrigued by them.

I think the best thing with C.A.S is that it will never get boring because the diversity of activities that are proposed to you is so great, meaning that students will have no trouble choosing more than one activity. The activities that I was involved in within the two years of IB C.A.S were:

• Stop motion video
• Rock Band
• Planning for teaching English
• English tutoring for Thai local Students
• Wood carving
• Moving furniture
• Weights and Fitness
• Mountain Biking
• Rugby
• Ultimate Frisbee

All of these activities I have enjoyed and obtained C.A.S hours for, all for something I do outside of school; whether it is Creative, Sportive or Servable.

I think it is a great thing for IB students to do this because with the amount of work that needs to be done, some of us might not be able to find time to have fun and try new to sports or Arts, but if it is part of the "work" we need to complete by the end of grade 12, then it is an other story. I can have fun and do the things I like without feeling gilt about the opportunity cost of the hours I have not spent studying. There are only positive things about C.A.S. and that is a fact.

Of course it might be hard sometimes to continuously do the same activity because its is the only thing interests you, but be a risk taker and choose something that you have not done before, it might very well surprise you!

PTIS Perspective Club is a co-curricular led by Andie J, Pongsakorn Visettherakul (Bank), and Earth T. PTIS perspective is a group held curricular where art students enrich PTIS life with the essence of affluent artistic capability while gaining CAS hours for creativity from developing imaginative artworks.

What we did in Term 1: In term one, we started off with drawing, painting, lino-carving, and charcoal sketching. We had our students focus on perspective type drawings. These drawings are relevant to dimension and shading based drawings. The students seemed to enjoy this activity very much and the number of artworks excelled as we continued to undergo this activity.

What we did in Term 2: In term two we decided to have the students do something other than drawing buildings and perspectives. We had the students carve lino and do print making instead. During this process of lino-printing we decided to sell our prints at the PTIS farm market and donate all of the money to the farm. We plan to continue selling lino prints at this market and donate the money to a charity that we will find in the future. Some of these line printings consisted of mountains, birds, rice crops, lilies, and other types of flowers. We have recently found out that the gift cards were a success at the market, the S.S.F?? group was impressed by our cards and many of those who went to the market bought them.

What we did in Term 3: The agenda for term 3 was to do canvas paintings. We planned to display these canvas paintings throughout the PTIS community such as the library, boarding, cafeteria, and senior school. These paintings were be rather large paintings and very detailed. The main theme for these paintings was based on the beautiful exotic environment of PTIS. We planned to have at least two works done for each student in the club.

Aims for Term 4: By the end of the year we should have collected enough artwork to have an art exhibition. We plan to have Ajarn Natalie help us organize this exhibition. This will be held in the PTIS auditorium if we can plan the time and space needed for the exhibition. This will not be a big exhibition but enough so that we can have our artworks displayed and admired by either PTIS visitors or the PTIS community themselves.

The most gratifying aspect of CAS, in my experience, is the service. It is also the most difficult because the focus is not on yourself, but on others. However, in my experience it is worth it to enjoy the feeling of helping others. My best service experience was in Grade 11 with the teaching groups that went to the local school. This may be a discouraging activity at first, especially if your group lacks Thai speakers. Getting the children to focus may also prove to be a difficulty. In the early stages of the teaching activity I often found myself ignored and frustrated. This said, we slowly learned how to make the lessons more focused and more enjoyable for everybody - both the students and ourselves.

The purpose of this article is to help those who are having trouble teaching the kids or are beginning the IB and would like tips on how to carry out this activity. The most important tip I can give you is – use your planning sessions wisely! Don’t just make a vague, rough outline of what you plan to do. In my experience, when a group did this, it took more time for the teachers to prepare themselves in the actual lesson, thus allowing time for the kids to lose focus and for energy to diminish throughout the classroom.

You will find that the lessons become more gratifying as your planning becomes more detailed and precise. With a strict lesson focus, you can actually feel that the students are learning something – and that feeling is what makes CAS worthwhile. What’s even better is that if you plan, you will be able to get through the teaching more quickly and thus there will be more time to play learning games with the kids.

I hope that future students will use this advice - and not just for the teaching activity, but also for any service activity because the same principles apply to any activity where you are helping people. In this way, future students will be able to get the full gratifying experience that I did.

It also gives IB students insight into the lives and difficulties of our own teachers. In the words of an anonymous fellow student, "it allows us to be more compassionate to our own teachers because we get a glimpse of what they have to face everyday."

Again, the sense of accomplishment is more than worth the time dedicated to teaching these kids. After all, what’s better than a child’s laughter?

On Friday the 27th of November we, the ACSA group (Takuya, Poom, Earth, Gun, Ying), went to the Thai local Doi Saket Wittayakom school to host different kinds of activities together with the ACSA group from NIS.


For the CAS program, it is our aim to demonstrate our social interaction capabilities and act as a leader to provide services for others. The purpose of the Inter-faith service day was that we get to know each other from different schools and exchange some of our thoughts. We met up with A. Brad the week before to discuss the event and went ahead to plan our own games that were fun, interactive, and educational for grade 9 students at the school.

On the actual day, we were honored to have the Consulate General of the United States Embassy, Mr. Morrow, to introduce the event and supervise the day with us. We enjoyed the time we spent together doing all sort of activities that got us cooperating with each other and exchanging our various customs.

Our first activity was hosted by the NIS students; we got to play a game where two people in the middle of the circle have to look for the name of the animal being said and hit them while the student with the chosen animal name had to call out other animals before they are caught by the hunter. In this game, all of us had fun trying not to get hit by the hunter in the middle and, while at the same time, practicing saying the name of the animal in English.

The second activity was led by us. We basically had words and their anograms in pairs and put them on each other’s backs. The objective was that participants had to look for their pair and in the end each pair got to tell the rest of the class what their word means. This game took a lot of time but all of the students got to develop thier vocabularies from their own pairings but also those of the others.

The last activity of the day was passing the sentence game. All of us lined up in four lines and a sentence was told to the first person in each of the lines, the message is passed on one by one toward the person at the end of the line. It turned out that all of the groups were successful with this.

At the end of the day, the ending speech was presented and we had the photo sessions. While we got to know more about each other through games and activities, the Thai local school students got to cooperate together as a team as well as learning new English skills and vocabularies. It was a great experience for all of us.

A display of smiles, joyful chants and the pitter patter of little feet were merely some of the details present within the scene that was to be witnessed as we made our way out of the PTIS vans and into the Starfish Home for Children, here in Mae Rim, Chiang Mai.

This home, once a posh resort located within the outskirts of Chiang Mai; has undergone a complete transformation, now serving as a home for children, who, not necessarily orphaned, merely need a place to stay as their families are unable to shelter them.

This home, with its once prevalent emphasis on financial gain now usurped by the motivation to help make a difference in young children’s lives becomes, every two weeks, a harmonious display of intercultural interaction between children, and those who wish to give them a breath of fresh air from the normality of their lives at the center.

Thus, every two weeks, on a Saturday morning, a group of about eight to fifteen students from PTIS gathers in the cafeteria around 8 A.M and prepares to take the 40 minute ride to the center. Due to the voluntary nature of the activity, certain sessions sees more or less students depending on the amount of work they have - however, punctuality has never been a concern as attendance has always been sufficient to make the trip worthwhile.

Of all the Saturday mornings we spent at the Starfish Home for Children, there is one morning which still resonates within me. During the last session I attended, we had decided to bake cookies and other goods for the children.

Having premade the mixes before hand, we arrived armed with cookie dough, syrup and food coloring. From the moment the children noticed that we were going to be cooking, a sudden wave of joy flowed across their faces. We then showed them how to flatten the dough and how to cut it into the shapes needed.

It was funny to see how some children preferred flattening the mix whilst some others would rather color the un-cooked dough - all of the children found the fun in whatever part of the cooking process they were involved in. Needless to say, most of them had food coloring all over their fingers by the time the food came out of the over - perhaps a fact that heightened fun ever more for everybody.

In the end, the activity was not only beneficial for the children but for us as well. Being there, seeing the smiles on children who have the odds against them is truly an inspirational feat. Although at first I thought of waking up on a Saturday morning as being a painstaking task, I began to look forwards to going to Starfish - and now, as the activity has come to its close, I miss those Saturday mornings.

Although I probably will not see these children again since I am graduating in less than two months, one thing I know for sure is that I will forever carry within me the memories of their smiles and laughs – the memoires that even I could make a difference in the live of these children.

I still remember the first day of the Viengping Girls’ Home visit to PTIS. It was the 13th of September. While waiting for the vans to arrive, the student volunteers with their supervisors, A. Jenn and A. Ann, were planning how to rotate the kids so that they could all participate in the activities we had planned for them. The gym was booked, sports equipment were borrowed from the boarding house and bathing suits were freshly washed and neatly folded.

We were so excited when the vans pulled in but imagine our shock when the kids started coming out. There were 20 kids ages 4-6 years old, and there were more boys than girls! We had to quickly change our plans. Playing basketball and badminton were definitely out as they were too short to reach the net. We need to find swimming trunks too!

We organized a tag game and our supervisors gathered all the materials they could find in their classrooms to transform the gym into an Art Attack session.

The kids loved to be carried and drink water using the paper cones. They loved splashing in the children’s pool. I spent such a nice and meaningful time especially with one kid called Pi. Even though I can not speak Thai, we communicated pretty well with smiles and gestures. I won't forget when he smiles at me…

As part of our service program in Term 1, the Grade 11 students established ties with Srisangwan School of the Disabled. There were a total of 12 students along with A. Sebastian and A. Jeremy guiding us. We paid our first visit on the 31st of August.

During our first visit, the boys were to play sports like basketball and soccer with the older kids and the girls were to do some art with the rest of the children who could not engage in physical activities.

The boys, Jigme, Stanley, Jordan, Tiziano, Justin, Sid and Useng, were having a tough time playing sports as the children were really good at it and the weather was hot too. I could see that the boys’ shirt were wet with sweat, their faces had turned red and starting to get sunburn.

The girls, Yeshey, Alida, Am, Risa and myself, were doing art and at the same time distributing sweets and snacks to the children who were very grateful for whatever food we could share to them.

The second trip which was on the 28th of September. This time we did not take many snacks but took a lot of sport items like basketballs, soccer balls, Frisbees, badminton racquets and skipping ropes. We also had a lot of art materials like color pencils, crayons and water colours.

We divided ourselves in two groups some of us played sports while some did art with the children. The children were really into art especially, one boy who was in my group. His name was Krue. He really enjoyed art and the most amazing thing was that he used his mouth to draw because his hands were disabled. He drew a sketch of me admiring him and the sketch came out quite well.

We were all tired at the end of each visit but it was worthwhile because of the things we have learned from our experience of interacting with children who have severe disabilities.

We learnt how to play with the disabled children although we had a big communication gap as most of them did not understand English and we did not understand Thai.

We also found out that even though they had some disabilities, they try to find ways to do different things which made them no different than us.

This service activity made us realize that everyone can live life happily and make things possible even though they are not perfect.

Dateline: 4 June 2009


This week several grade 11 CAS students: Bank, Jigme, Julia, Maarten, Tang, Thai and Yeshey, accompanied A. Mel, A. Sandy and K. Joy to the local temple for a "first" meeting with the numerous male and female dogs that the Hand to Paw initiative is supporting.

What luck!!!! All the dogs were there and came running with tails wagging and smiling "dog" faces as we walked through the temple entrance. Of course every one of them knew there would be treats and they weren’t to be disappointed!

The students came prepared with several boxes of dog bones. Everyone was advised to let the dogs come to them since many are very shy and frightened of individuals they do not know and do not trust. However, it didn’t take long. The students seemed to have the magic touch. Perhaps the dogs sensed their goodwill.

Our purpose this week was to familiarize the students with the dogs and give them an opportunity to get to know them. We also wanted to teach them to assess the animals’ physical needs and to look for possible medical problems.

Despite our vigilance over the past few weeks the students found several dogs in need of additional care. Nam Tang had a sore under her chin, most likely a dog bite that required immediate attention.

A group effort removed ticks from Leela and also made sure she was thoroughly sprayed. Star and Dave who are both recovering from recent illness and surgery were given additional food by the students to "fatten them up".


Each student then selected a specific dog that they will monitor and assess for future medical attention. Dam Mee has considerable hair loss that doesn’t seem to be responding to recent treatment so one student will carefully check her next week. It may mean a trip to the local vet.

The students also recorded for each individual dog a description including physical conditions that might require intervention in the future. K. Joy was delighted by the response of the students, finding them gentle, caring and genuinely interested in the dogs and their well-being.

All are anxious to return to the temple next Thursday when we hope to provide treatment for those in need but also to bathe and spray the dogs.

After just one visit several of the participants can’t wait to return and are already making plans for next school year. It seems like the Hand to Paw has touched many hearts at PTIS. The kindness and caring demonstrated by these students will ensure a healthy, happier and safer life for the four-legged residents of the local village temple.