empirizam-blog

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Christmas Fair

Date of Activity: 26.12 - 28.12.2018.

Length of Activity: 15 hours

Type of Activity: Creativity 

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Volunteering in the Dom Rada Vranješević

Date of Activity: 01.10.2017 - 26.02.2019.

Length of Activity: 30 hours

Type of Activity: Creativity and Service

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Ljepljenjka Project - Trip to Novo Mesto

Date of Activity: 11.10.2018.

Length of Activity: 6 hours

Type of Activity: Creativity

First time me and my classmates got in touch with this special and extraordinary Ljepljenka project was back in the February. It was pretty brief and it lasted for only less than an hour. Our task was to choose certain topic and to cut some words and phrases out of newspapers and magazines and to form some meaningful text that is connected to the topic. Picked pieces of paper were glued to the bigger one which should simultaneously represent some figure that is also connected to the original topic. 

My group made a little project called “Money in the Middle.” Out of words such as money, corruption, government, nation, people etc. we made two men, one smaller than the other and the bag full of money between them. Words used for the creation of the bigger man were focused on describing government and how our people see it, while the smaller man was used for the expression of people’s opinions and revolts. There were a lot of additional words, phrases and pictures there that were proving our point, but the complete impression can only be gotten by the standing in front of the whole project and really seeing and feeling words and their context. 

Few weeks after this project, our group found out that we took a second place but our school on some competition in Slovenia won the first place!! That’s why we were invited to Novo Mesto where we saw a magnificent play, we went sightseeing of that beautiful little city and altogether had a wonderful time. 

Learning Outcomes: Increased my awareness of my strengths and areas for growth, undertaken new challenges, shown perseverance and commitment on my activities, planned and initiated activities, worked collaboratively with others and developed new skills.

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23rd Ljubljana Marathon

Date of Activity: 10.07 - 28.10.2018.

Length of Activity: 80 hours (4h per week, 20 weeks in total till the 21st of October)

Type of Activity: Action

Learning Outcomes: I have increased awareness of my own strengths and areas for growth, undertaken new challenges, planned and initiated the activity, worked collaboratively with others, showed perseverance and commitment in the activity.

One year ago, I volunteered on First Night Half-Marathon that took place in Banja Luka, as a person who was supposed to guard the running track and to conduct people and cars away from it. As I have been training tennis for about 10 years now, it got kind of boring, or let’s say less challenging and interesting for me. Therefore this year I decided to take part in a half-marathon and to try myself in a new type of sport. Initially I wanted to run the half-marathon in my city so my preparations started in the beginning of July. However, injury that happened 2 weeks before the race made me skip that one, and run in Ljubljana one and a half month later. I got an inflammation of Achilles tendon and I struggled with it for about 3 weeks. This period of time was large enough for me to fall out of form a bit and it was especially aggravating because it was so close to my race day. When I finally began to train again, there were only 2 weeks left to gain my form back. After the race I still don’t think that I reached my previous form and therefore I have’t reached the results I was hoping for, but still I am not disappointed in results I achieved. At the end of the day, I ran 21.034 km for 2:11:25. Considering that it was my first half-marathon, I am pretty satisfied with my time, as well as with the organisation of the race, atmosphere in the hole city and with people who were standing by the track and neglecting heavy rain that was pouring, they were constantly supporting us throughout the race. To conclude, I can take only positive experience from this event, and I liked it that much that recently I have been thinking about preparing for a whole marathon. That is just one idea I have to elaborate, but for now I am going on a well deserved rest. 

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Skiing

Date of Activity: 31.12.2017 - 12.01.2018.

Length of Activity: around 70 hours (6h per day)

Type of Activity: Action

Learning Outcomes: I increased my awareness of my strength and areas of growth, showed perseverance and commitment on my activity, developed existing skills.

Like every year, me and my family went on a winter vacation, but this time in Gestein, Austria. We spent there 13 days, but 12 spent on skiing. Fortunately, the weather was really good and there was a lot of snow, so conditions were perfect. Even though it was a little bit exhausting for all of us to ski 12 days in a row, we found this trip really wonderful and interesting.

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Film about Banja Luka on German

Date of Activity: 02.11.2017 - 23.03.2018.

Length of Activity: 15 hours

Type of Activity: Creativity

Learning Outcomes: I have undertaken new challenges, planned and initiated activities, worked collaboratively with others, shown perseverance and commitment on my activities, developed new skills.

Our German class had a task to make a short movie about Banja Luka and all its beauties. We were divided in 4 groups, and every group had to cover a different topic. My friend and i had a cultural and historic view of our city. I did cultural part. First of all, we had to write a text about our topic, and than, we went on filming part. Some parts of movie were filmed on our own, and some were filmed with a professional camera. Quality was not missed in both cases. When all parts of film were done, we passed it to one student who put it all together. Also, he inserted our texts in speech form so that the viewer could follow it easier. 

Here you can see our final product: [ hope you will enjoy (: ]

https://goo.gl/eQgER8

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School of Cyber Policy

Date of Activity: 25.10. - 20.12.2017.

Lenght of Activty: 15 hours

Type of Activity: Creativity

Learning Outcomes: I have increased my awareness of my strengths and areas of growth, undertaken new challenges, worked collaboratively with others, shown perseverance and commitment on my activities, developed new skills.

I was interested in IT and computers that much, that i almost took a computer science subject on my IB program instead of physics. Some universities require curtain subject and their marks, so that was the reason I study physics today. As soon as i heard that there will be held an IT course, I signed up without having any second thoughts.It was powered by American Corner and Smart Office, so it wasn’t organized by school. What is more important, so far I am not regretting it! In my opinion it is really useful, because it covers important fields of IT world such as: architecture of the internet and who controls it, artificial intelligence, something about hacking, how to prevent it etc.. I think that this will help me to expend my previous knowledge as well as learning something new.

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Art Classes

Date of Activity: 01.10. - 26.12.2017.

Lenght od Activity: 15 hours

Type of Activity: Creativity

Learning Outcomes: I have undertaken new challenges, worked collaboratively with others, shown perseverance and commitment on my activities, developed new skills.

I have been always interested in art, in all its shapes and sizes. At first, i took Visual Arts as my 7th IB subject, but I found it better and more compatible if I just took the art classes without having visual arts. This way i won’t have some kind of pressure, that marks and deadlines would create, and i can purely enjoy doing what i like, what makes me feel better, more relaxed, and maybe what will help me to develop some skills and my personality. To conclude, i haven’t regret any decision that i made when it comes to this topic, and so far, i am really enjoying it.

On the pictures below, you can see some works that i made.

On the last 3 pictures, there is some special type of chamfering of silver and copper, that gives possibility of creating a wonderful and extraordinary pieces of art.

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UWC Students in Banja Luka

Date of Activity: 15.09. - 19.09.2017.

Lenght of Activity: 25 hours

Type of Activity: Creativity, Service

Learning Outcomes: I have undertaken new challenges, worked collaboratively with others, planned and initiated activities, shown perseverance and commitment on my activities, considered the ethical implications of my actions, developed new skills.

Every year, students from UWC School from Mostar come to Banja Luka. They go in Gymnasia as well, with the rest of us, and we are together almost every and each day. We were introducing them to our IB program, how it all works here, we were showing them around the city, explaining them a little part of Banja Luka’s history etc. They were sharing with us their experiences with their program, and we all gave each other some pieces of advice that could help us getting better in school. Since many of them is from some foreign countries, like for example Spain, Denmark.., they have hardly heard about our country as well as about our city, so it was quite interesting spending time with them.

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Strength and Endurance Training

Date of Activity: 01.09.2017 - 10.06.2018.

Length of Activity: about 81 hours

This Activity is: Action

Learning Outcomes: I have increased their awareness of their own strengths and areas for growth, worked collaboratively with others and I have I have  shown perseverance and commitment in my activities.

Since i was playing a professional tennis before high school, i had to go on these kind of training as well. I have been doing this for about 5 years, but hours above are counted only from the first year of IB DP, so no need to worry ;) Below you can see me practicing and some proofs for my whole story.

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Making of Electronical Music

Date of Activity: 09.10.2017 - 10.06.2018.

Lenght of Activity: around 32 hours

This Activity is: Creativity

When i firstly heard, that in our school will be held a class in which students, along with two professors, can express their creativity and show their skills when it comes to music, i instantly knew, that that was a perfect call for me. I have been playing a guitar for 2 years now, and I’ve always wanted to make my own music, instead of just covering someone others songs. On our first meeting, all my wishes and anticipation came true. I liked it so much, that i have been composing my own songs for a while now. For all my gained knowledge and success in this area, i can thank to both of my professors, Srđan Grbić and Draško Perać. They introduced us all very well with an unknown matter and helped us to develop even further our love for music. 

This is how my first song looks like :)

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Making of French Desert

Date of Activity: 17.10.2017.

Lenght of Activity: 5.5  hours

This Activity is: Creativity

Even though The World Food Day was yesterday, our school will celebrate it tomorrow. The plan is that we are going to have few boothes and each one will represents a certain country and its tradition by making some of their own deserts, like for example students who have Italy will make tiramisu. All the money collected will be donated to charity. Along with two of my classmates, my task was to prepare something from France, profiterole to be more precise. I found it kind of difficult, so i needed a little help from my mother. Together we made it, at least in my opinion, really successful, but we will see tomorrow whether or not they will be all sold out :) 

Here are some pictures of how did all process and final product look like.

P.S. Final count of my hours spent on this activity is time that took me for both making and selling those cookies.

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1. Night Half- Marathon in Banja Luka

Date of Activity: 30.09.2017.

Lenght of Activity: 7 hours

This Activity is: Service

Yesterday I was volunteering at the First Night Half- Marathon in our city. Every volunteer was given a certain location with a particular task. Mine was to block a street and not to let cars reach an area where the runners will pass. In first few hours, everything was fine and under control. But when the night fell, problems started to appear. As the night became darker and colder, many volunteers left their locations, which occurred a confusion of runners. They didn’t know which way they were supposed to go. In one moment even I was confused because nobody told us by which path runners should go. Lack of organization was very visible, but this is the first marathon of this kind that was held in Banja Luka, so I think that we shouldn’t judge this one. One thing we can do though- we can help make the next one better organized and more visited. Join us!

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Tennis Coaching

Date of Activity: 1.10.2017.

Approximate # of Hours: 2 hours

This Activity is: Activity, Service

One of my top priorities in the next two years is to get a Tennis Coach License. Since I have been training tennis for 10 years, I found it very commodiously to achieve this goal. In order to get used to coaching perspective of this sport, I have already started giving lessons. Today I tried to help my friend to get better at tennis. She used to play, but now she isn’t in such a good form. Both of us did our best to improve her skills, and I think she did it really good. I will continue helping her until she becomes as successful as Serena Williams! :)

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European Day of Languages 2017

Date of Activity: 15.9. - 26.9.2017.

Lenght of Activity: 6 hours

This Activity is: Creativity

Our school annually celebrates The European Day of Languages. This year I took part in as a Waltz dancer, and experienced something really interesting. My partner, Sofia, and I joined a bit late the rehearsals, because we weren’t informed on time. Anyway, it all ended well. But until we made everything right, e.g. choreography, posture.., we have gone through some difficulties. For example, main obstacle was that, song, that we danced to, wasn’t made for waltz, so it was kind of challenging for both of us to adjust ourselves to it. But in the end, I can say that our performance was pretty successful.

In the first photo, you can see us practicing, and in the last three, our final version. :)

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ATP Challenger Banja Luka 2017

Date of Activity: 10.09.2017.

Approximate # of Hours: 6h

Lenght of Activity: 1 day

This Activity is (c/a/s): Service

This week ATP Challenger is taking place in Banja Luka, in Mladen Stojanović park. My club is an organizer of that tournament. Thanks to my 10- years tennis experience, I got a chance to participate in it, by being a technical support. In fact, I had some equipment, with who i was following the score of the matches and displaying it, so the audience could uninterruptedly enjoy. In some pauses between matches, I was preparing courts for the play. I am very glad I was part of something special like that. I met some well-known tennis players and gained a lot of experience. I got an offer from an organizer to help them next year and I am looking forward to it.

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WELCOME

Hello everyone, this is my CAS blog!

Andrej Simićević