The PISA 57th PGB Malta 2024: The Eye of the Maltese Luzzu”

Hello!

We are the Year 3 students who are in the Student Council of Maria Regina College, Mosta Primary A for the school year 2023-2024:

• Yan Gauci
• Janepher Guarro
• Hailey Balzia
• Chloe Vella
• Nathan Johnson
• Julia Fenech
• Ylenia Bartolo
• Zack Deguara
• Nirvana Ciantar
• Kate Farrugia

We went on a super cool adventure with Ms. Marisa Bonello, the assistant head, and Ms. Sue Flask, our art teacher! We got asked to make something special for the 57th PISA Governing Board, happening in Malta in April 2024. It was a big deal because our school joined a competition, and guess what? We won!

As a team, we worked really hard to think of a cool idea. We wanted to make something awesome, using stuff that we recycled, and that shows how cool Malta is. We put our heads together, worked as a team, and yay, we did it! Now, let’s take a journey with us and see how we did it all!

The Initial Meeting

Together with Ms. Sue Flask, our art teacher, started by thinking really hard to come up with a cool idea that shows how awesome Malta is.

We talked about lots of stuff, like the Maltese Cross, the National Flag, il-Gardjola, il-Karozzin, and il-Luzzu. Those were some of the ideas we thought about.

In the end, we picked something super cool and meaningful: the eye of a Maltese Luzzu boat!

Gathering of resources

Since one of the requirements was to be eco-friendly, we chose to use cardboard, which we could recycle. We started gathering cardboard from our homes. It was easy! In just one week, we collected lots of different kinds of cardboard. We had cereal boxes, pasta boxes, tissue boxes, egg cartons, and more! We had a whole bunch of different stuff to work with.

The initial sketches

Ms. Marisa Bonello and Ms. Sue Flask gave us a picture of the Luzzu’s eye to use. They told us to let our imaginations run wild and make the eye look really cool and unique.

Adapting resources for our purpose

After we drew some pictures, we talked about whether to make the eye colourful or just use one colour. As a team, we decided to stick with one colour for the eye. We also thought about using bright colours for the PISA logo.

Bringing Our Vision to Life

At this point, we were really into our project. We used our break time to turn our drawings into real things.

We all tried making different versions of the eye, and then we had to choose the best one. After talking about it, we decided to go with a simple one-color version of the Luzzu’s eye.

Converting the token into a digital image

We had to make 200 tokens, which seemed like a huge number for us because we’re just kids and we only worked on it during break time. Cutting all that cardboard and putting it together took a long time, but we really wanted to finish our goal.

Then, Mr. Oliver Vella and Ms. Daniela Zerafa, Education officers for Engineering Technology and Information Technology, came to help us. They said we could use technology to make things easier, especially cutting the cardboard. We had a fun session with them where they showed us how to trace our token so we could make a digital outline of each shape. Then, they said we could use a CNC machine to do all the cutting for us!

We were super excited because we had never done anything like this before, and we were eager to learn new things.

Here it is! We have an outline of every shape we need to make our Luzzu eye. Each part has a number so we can easily find it when we put them all together. This is going to make our project so much easier!

Cutting the cardboard

We got to use a special machine called a CNC laser engraver machine to cut out our cardboard pieces. We had never heard of such a thing before, so Ms. Marisa, along with Mr. Oliver and Ms. Daniela, arranged for us to visit Maria Regina College, Secondary School, Mosta, so we could see how it works.

At the school, Mr. Franco Bugeja, who is in charge of Engineering Technology, showed us how the CNC machine works. He helped us put our digital design into the machine’s software, and then the machine used a laser to cut out the pieces. Thanks to Mr. Franco, we now know more about how this machine works!

Now that we knew how to use the CNC machine, we were able to cut out all the cardboard pieces we needed much faster than if we had to do it all by hand. It was way easier with the machine!

Gluing it all together

Finally, we were almost done with our project! It was time to glue all the pieces together in a neat and organized way. Even though our little fingers helped, we still had to be patient and carefully stick each piece one by one. Every break, every day, we worked on it until we finished. And guess what? We got them all ready on time! We did it!

This was our journey from the beginning to the end. It was like an adventure where we all worked together as a team. We made a simple token, and we’re really thankful for the time and effort we put into it. It was a lot of fun working together!