I just came back home from the IB Extended Essay presentation, and the one thing that struck me was how many people presented on the history of their country of origin. I'd estimate that three-fourths of the candidates wrote their EE on history and one-fourth on a literary topic. Probably several discussed an art-related topic, only one person (as far as I know) wrote the EE on technology (ITGS), and nobody did anything on physics or math.
Do English and history really interest so many people, or did they choose it mainly for safety in numbers? (Or because O'Byrne discouraged people from doing anything but those subjects?) I searched online for people who had chosen the sciences: math, physics or ITGS (which, since the course focuses on society so much, doesn't seem like a science at first, but at least it's grounded in computer science).
Searching with Google for "ib extended essay math" returns two promising results. The first is an IB EE topic discussion thread. Posts 43 and 44 (search the page for "#43") discuss math as an EE topic. One of the students was going to use game theory as a topic but "my supervisor told me that i couldnt expect the examiner to know anything at all about game theory." So clearly we're very limited by the readers' knowledge—game theory is not an obscure branch of mathematics by any means, so if we do math we'll probably have to either stick to the basics or explain all the more advanced concepts in painstaking detail.
The second good result was someone who had published their math/physics paper on juggling online. The paper seems pretty interesting (I only skimmed it) and the author makes moderate use of equations around the end of the paper, contrary to my expectation that the paper would be almost completely prose. Of course, the paper didn't necessarily get a good score, but at least something like this has been done and the evidence is there for us to see.
Finally, I searched around for a topic more in my area of computer science. During the presentations, I was thinking about some topics I could use in the technology area. For example, I liked the idea of doing something about how the open-source development model has influenced corporate software development, or the growing role of open-source software in society (yes, that's vague, but these are only ideas from off the top of my head). So I searched for "ib extended essay itgs open source" and I got only one relevant result: a (seemingly) official IB ITGS document that, on page 113, gave a sample prompt ("intended for guidance only"): "How Open Source software has led to improved corporate networking." To clarify, corporate networking is intended in the sense of "LinkedIn," and not in the sense of "enterprise networking with Cisco."
So I rephrased the query to "ib extended essay itgs +linux," for which I got a great result: a paper about Free-Libre Open Source Software and its future in K-12 education. This paper is really in-depth and well-researched; it even includes surveys of school sysadmins from around the world.
Anyway, I wanted to be sure that not doing an English or history paper for the IB Extended Essay was viable and proven, and it seems like it's does have some precedent. Although even if there was no precedent, I would probably still do something on ITGS, since I just can't bring myself to be passionate about history, and at best I can only be somewhat enthusiastic about English.
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