The MYP Personal Project Expo Chile 2025 was not a school fair. It was not a display of posters in a gymnasium that teachers walk past and parents photograph. It was something students across multiple countries had worked toward for months, and it showed.
Held at Santiago College in Chile, the 2025 edition of the EXPO Chile International brought together MYP students from different schools and different countries to present their Personal Projects to a real audience, exchange ideas with peers they had never met before, and connect their work to issues that exist well beyond any classroom.
What made it land was simple: the students were not performing for a grade. They were talking to each other.
What the MYP Projects EXPO Chile International Actually Is
The EXPO started in 2023, built by Santiago College as a collaboration among MYP schools in Chile. The idea was straightforward. The MYP Personal Project is one of the most significant things a Year 5 student does during middle school. It takes months. It is self-directed. It asks students to pursue a genuine inquiry, produce something real, and reflect honestly on what they learned. And then, in most schools, it gets assessed, filed, and largely forgotten.
The EXPO was designed to change that. By creating a shared public space where students could present their work to peers from other schools and other countries, it gave the Personal Project an audience it does not usually get. By 2025, the event had grown beyond Chile, bringing together MYP learners from different schools and countries to showcase their Personal Projects.
Angel Girano, the Middle School Academic Coordinator at Santiago College, describes it as more than an exhibition. It is a space where students exchange ideas, explain their learning process, and connect their projects to challenges that matter globally.
What Students Said About Being There
The student voices from the 2025 EXPO are worth reading slowly, because they say something honest about what this kind of experience actually does.
One student put it this way: “Being part of the Chile International Expo was like seeing the world through a much wider lens. I realised that even though we live in different countries, students everywhere are passionate about the same global issues, like protecting our wetlands. Sharing our book with people from different cultures taught me that an international mindset isn’t just a concept in a textbook; it’s a bridge we build when we listen to each other’s stories.”
That is not a student reciting IB learner profile language back at you. That is someone who actually experienced something.
Another student added: “The Expo showed me that learning does not end when the project is finished. By looking at other students’ inquiries, I started asking new questions about my own. This experience wasn’t just about showing off what we knew; it was a collaborative space where we reflected on our mistakes and celebrated our growth together.”
That second one is particularly striking. Most school events are about showing finished work. This one, by the students’ own account, made them think differently about work they thought they had already completed.
What Teachers and Schools Took From It
The feedback from educators was just as consistent. Teachers observed higher levels of ownership, reflection, and engagement. Schools valued the opportunity to connect across cultures and share approaches to learning and teaching.
Pilar Robles, Head of Victoria School in Bogotá, Colombia, brought her students to the EXPO and came away with something clear. She said: “The EXPO PP Chile International has allowed us to become part of a global learning community. It provides a unique space to put agency, inquiry, and reflection into practice, enabling us to connect with other young people and share our projects far beyond the classroom.”
What she is describing is not an add-on to the MYP Personal Project. It is the Personal Project working exactly as it was designed to. The difference is that here, someone built a stage for it.
Why This Matters Beyond the Event Itself
The MYP Personal Project already asks students to do something genuinely demanding. They choose their own topic, manage their own timeline, produce their own outcome, and reflect on their own process. The aims include sustaining self-directed inquiry, generating creative new insights, demonstrating skills over an extended period of time, and appreciating the process of learning itself.
Most of that happens quietly, behind the scenes, assessed by one teacher. The EXPO makes it visible. It gives students an external reference point for their work that is not a rubric score. It puts them in a room with peers who took the same process seriously and arrived at completely different places, which is one of the more useful things education can do.
The EXPO reflects the IB mission by showing how student collaboration across cultures can be a force for positive global change. That is the kind of sentence that can sound hollow when it appears in a brochure. At Santiago College in 2025, there were rooms full of students making it true in practice.
What Santiago College Has Built
Santiago College is authorised to offer three IB programmes: PYP, MYP and DP, and is accredited by CIS and NEASC. It sits in Lo Barnechea, Santiago, and has been running IB programmes long enough to understand what the frameworks are actually trying to accomplish.
The EXPO is a good example of a school that does not treat IB requirements as a checklist. The Personal Project is a requirement. Making it an international collaborative event attended by students from Colombia, Chile, and beyond is a choice. It is the kind of choice that makes the requirement mean something.
What the MYP Personal Project Is, For Anyone New to It
If you are a parent or student encountering the MYP for the first time, the Personal Project can feel abstract until you see it in action. Here is what it actually involves.
Every student completing Year 5 of the MYP undertakes a sustained independent project of their own design. They identify a topic that genuinely interests them, set a goal, plan their approach, produce an outcome and reflect on what they learned throughout. Schools register all MYP Year 5 students for external moderation of the Personal Project, promoting a global standard of quality.
The range of outcomes is genuinely wide. Students have written books, built apps, composed music, launched community initiatives, designed products and produced research that has gone on to inform real decisions. The EXPO at Santiago College exists to give that range of work an audience it deserves.
Sources: IB MYP Expo Chile 2025