Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) is at the heart of the IB Diploma Programme. With its holistic approach, CAS is designed to strengthen students’ personal and interpersonal learning.

CAS is organized around the three strands of creativity, activity, and service, defined as follows.

Creativity—exploring and extending ideas leading to an original or interpretive product or performance.
Activity—physical exertion contributing to a healthy lifestyle.
Service—collaborative and reciprocal engagement with the community in response to an authentic need.

CAS aims to develop students who:

• Enjoy and find significance in a range of CAS experiences
• Purposefully reflect upon their experiences
• Identify goals, develop strategies, and determine further actions for personal growth
• Explore new possibilities, embrace new challenges, and adapt to new roles
• Actively participate in planned, sustained, and collaborative CAS projects
• Understand they are members of local and global communities with responsibilities toward one another and the environment

A CAS experience is a specific event in which the student engages with one or more of the three CAS strands. It can be a single event or an extended series of events. Typically, a student’s CAS program combines planned/unplanned singular and ongoing experiences. All are valuable and may lead to personal development. However, a meaningful CAS program must be more than just a series of unplanned/singular experiences. Students must be involved in at least one CAS project during the program. A CAS project is a collaborative series of connected, sequential CAS experiences lasting at least one month, which include the five stages of investigation, preparation, action, reflection, and demonstration. A CAS project should be completed in an area of strong interest to the student and, ideally, include an element of service learning.