On the last day of 2020, IBcomputer sciencestudents of the 11th grade assembled at the Zhentao Building Lecture Hall for their Topic 1 presentation.

At the "product" launch, IB computer science teacher Ms. Mao invited experts from Xuhui District, recent graduates, and 12th graders to be the judges of the launch. They watched the product launching shows of the two "companies" and selected their favorite products.

The first team to take the stage was Econo Production who observed that many people are exposed to different styles of charts when studying economics despite the fact that drawing charts takes a lot of effort and there is a high risk of making mistakes. So, they designed a product called Econographer (an Office add-in) to help users create different styles of economic charts according to their needs and released it in the Microsoft Office App Store where it can be downloaded for free.

The second group of students, whose "company" is called Grapes, designed a website (www.grapetex.com) dedicated to converting handwritten (including in-picture form) mathematical expressions into LaTeX form in response to users' needs when writing mathematical expressions.

During the presentation, the two teams introduced the features and uniqueness of their products, allowing the judges to see the ingenuity of the product design. Demonstrations of the products were also made to visually present the usefulness of the products.

After the completion of this PBL project, the students expressed that they benefited a lot from it. They not only learned new learning methods and worked hard to make interesting and useful products, but also shared their novel ideas with everyone. All participants agreed that the launch had been very successful.

(Written by Lili Mao Pictures by Lili Mao)