"The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has been before." – Albert Einstein
First of all, even though I hate programming, but I need to take this Exploration as an experience. So, we had two teachers from America came to teach us from 2-4 pm from Monday to Friday. They taught us very well and I learned a lot from them. In this programming class, I made two projects with my partner. The first one was about hangman game. The second one was about tic tac toe game. We used Python to program this project.
Before I begin talking about sanitation, let’s take a step back and talk about wetlands. So, a wetland is a body water that has a lot of biodiversity live in. There are three types, which are constructed wetland, saltwater wetland, and freshwater wetland. Two biggest advantages that we found out from our Exploration were giving home and food to animals and save the environment. In Cambodia, one of our biggest natural disasters is flood. So, wetlands can help to protect against floods. This is because the plants in the wetlands can absorb the water. So, have wetlands where it has flood, it can save your house and your family.
So, let’s take a step further. Sanitation is the process of managing the waste to keep the environment clean. During our Exploration, we visited two constructed wetlands in Battambang (BBT) and in Siem Reap. They created this wetland to help their village. They absorb that all the wastewater that people use is going into the lake. So, to solve this problem they decided to build this wetland. The constructed wetland at BBT is a small old system. It has three small ponds and four big ponds. Also, it’s tradition constructed wetland and no concrete. At there, this constructed wetland provides a lot of advantages to the people. There are four biggest benefit that we found out which are, making the lake or river cleaner, farmer can water their crops, don’t have bad smell, and can treat water from murky to clean. BUT there are also some challenges. The biggest is that people at their not yet know about the effect of wastewater. Also, they don’t have enough money and don’t have people to maintain it.
Cultureshock Description
Exploration: Culture Shock in Cambodia
Dates: October-November 2014
Number of Student: 12
Learning Facilitator: Darath
Essential Questions:
How foreigner feel when they come to Cambodia for first time?
How do people live in Cambodia?
Interviewed People
At Cultural Village in Siem Reap
Can I ask you, do you want to change your country to become better? My answer is yes. As you know, Cambodia is a developing country, so I really want to change my country to have less poverty. Even though that I can’t change immediately, but I have this process. First I needed to encourage parents to send their kids to the school. Most underprivileged families don’t know about the benefit of sending their kids to the school. They always think that they are poor and so if they send their kids to the school, their family is still poor. If they don’t have the ability to send their kids to the school, we can build the school that can provide a scholarship to them like my Liger school. The next step after their child get a lot of knowledge they can change their family habit and they can find a legal job, so that they have income to support their family. After this their family will have a better life and have priority like other people.
I’d talked about sending their children to school to my neighbor and my relative. I said that you should send your children to the school because now the society need the people that have the knowledge. Even my parents now still encourage our neighbor and our relative to send their children to the school. But some of the people still have this mindset. They still think that if they send their children to the school, their livelihood will become poorer. But some people are sending and encouraging their children to go to the school. Even though not all people send their kids to the school but a few of them do. So, that mean we are successful because some family are sending their kids to school.
As you know that our country is a developing country, so there are a lot of rubbish beside the road and at their community. I’d been going out to the community to teach the people how to reduce plastic. First of all we had one survey to ask them to know how did they use their plastic. Then we started to share with them what we had learn in class. We taught them how to reduce plastic, like they should had one eco-friendly bag that they can use for many times. Most people in our community they burned their rubbish. As you know that burning the rubbish is bad for the earth like it can affect the atmosphere and it will have climate change. So, we tried to promote to them that burning the plastic is really affected the environment. Of course one way to reduce burning is using less plastic. If you had less plastic and you will burn the plastic less too.
Cambodia is a country that speaks Khmer language. So, in order to communicate with other people around the world we need to learn new language. In Liger we are teaching the kids around our community to know how to speak English. On each Friday the community students will come to our school to learn English from our students. It is really important to know English because it is the most commonly used language among foreign language speakers. Throughout the world, when people with different languages come together they commonly use English to communicate. So, when they grow up they have the job, they can use their English to communicate with the foreigner. That will bring them a lot easier than don’t know none of the English.
It is my fortunate that I am Cambodian people because I get this best opportunity to change my country to be a peaceful country and full of education. Even though Cambodia is a developing country, which mean is not the cleanest country or the best country. But I still love my country, I will take my knowledge to share the kids all around Cambodia if I can.
Dates: November 24, 2014-February 6, 2015
Number of students: 13
Learning Facilitator: Kichong
Essential Questions:
Our Exploration was about Entrepreneurship, which means to create something new and that you are passionate about. Basically this Exploration was about how to start a business. Also, this business was not about a big company, but it was about being creative to make a product. After that we printed our product by using a 3D printer. 3D printer is the printer that can print our product from the plastic and it can make three dimensions. First we needed to think about the idea. After we needed to make a prototype to show the people. Then we needed to ask the people for the feedback or anything that they want to change. After that we needed to make a team and then we changed our product, so that it was improved based on what customers need. Then we needed to choose who was our leader. The leader was a person that guided and helped to improve our team. Also, a leader always went first or at the front. For example, when we went to interview the people, the leader could go first to tell them who we are. Finally we could make our product in the 123 D design program and then send it to the printer. The printer will print our product depending on what our product was about.The main thing that I learned during Entrepreneurship was being a good leader. Also, I learned how to think creatively and about marketing, accounting and designing. Basically I learned how to make a product that could reduce people’s problem.
The six terms that always came up to my mind were RESILIENCE, BIAS, PROACTIVE, PROCESS, INTEGRITY and PROFIT. Why did I choose resilience? I chose resilience because in the business when something bad happened you couldn’t give up, you have to push yourself forward and keep going when things are bad. When you push yourself forward, you had to think if there is anything that you could improve to make your business become better. When you had the product to sell you were not supposed to be biased because all the people had the money to pay you, not just the person that you were biased to that had the money to pay for your product. Another important term that I always thought of was proactive because if you want to make a successful business you have to cause something to happen not just wait for it to happen. Also, being an entrepreneur you have to make your own process. You are the only one who knows how to achieve the big goal because you made your own steps already. For sure in entrepreneurship, you have to have integrity to your team or your own business otherwise your business will fail because nobody would trust you. Why do you want to make a business? For sure every person all around the world starts their business because they want a lot of profit in order to feed themselves or their family.
If I have another Entrepreneurship Exploration next time I will:
My product is about Book standing, you can put the books on our product while you are reading!! http://bookstanding.weebly.com/
I always write a Weekly Journal about our holidays or something that I really want to write about. Example: I really wanted to write about my best friend because I wanted other people to know more about her. After I wrote about my best friend, I needed to send it to my Literacy teacher so that she can comment on it. Then she will send it back to me to fix the errors.
Best friend: Linda
Date of birth: January 7, 2002
Address: Kampong Thom Province
My best friend is named Linda. She is 12 years old. She was younger than me only one day. I met her when I was six years old. I met her when I was going to learn in the government school. We played with each other. We shared our knowledge to each other. When I didn’t understand the lesson she always helped to explain it to me. I really like her so much because she is very kind. Also, she always grinned very big to me. When I played with her or sat with her it made me feel very comfortable and very confident. When I felt sad or angry with someone I always went to approach her because I want to share my feelings with her. When we both have free time we always play some games. Sometimes we ate snack with each other and learned new things with each other. We both were the smart students in the school. I got number one in the class and then she got number two. When I got number two she got number three. So we always shared what we have and we shared many funny stories with each other.
Extension: Football
Coach: JoJo
Training: 4:20 pm-5:30 pm
Location: Liger’s sport court/community sport court
Football is the best sport for me. So, every Tuesday I have the training with my coach named Jojo. So, after school ends we go to play with each other from 4:20 pm until 5:30 pm. In this Extension I have learned how to pass the ball and how to shoot the ball. Also, I learn how to do headers and sometimes there is one person who throws the ball to us and then we have to go to the ball and make that ball land on our chest. My strength is defending the ball from the other team.
We have already had five tournaments with other international schools in Cambodia. We have won four tournaments, but the third tournament we lost because their girls were so big (like nineteen years old). So, we lost and we were the second place. When it is the time that we have the tournament, my coach always puts me in defense.
Going out to play football in the community field
Competition with other schools
Exploration name: Ecotourism
Exploration dates: August 13-October 3, 2014
Learning Facilitator: Jeff
Number of students: 13
Essential questions:
(1) What is Eco-tourism?
(2) How can Eco-tourism help change our country?
Ecotourism means to travel to natural areas that protect environment and help people life at location became better. Ecotourism was also about helping to preserve the environment. Our ecotourism group went to Chi Phat to study about the ecotourism in Chi Phat. Also, we learned about how ecotourism in Chi Phat are different from other ecotourism sites. Our big goal when we went to Chi Phat was to interview as many people as possible. We interviewed different people to get different answers and all the people had different perspectives. After we interviewed a lot of people we came back and studied about the information we found some areas of concern. Our group made a recommendation to Chi Phat community about the areas of concern. Some areas of concern are education, transportation, marketing, collaboration, and energy. After we finished we will send it to Martin and Prom Hong, the CBET (Community Based Eco-tourism Site) directors.
Interviewed people: 
Teaching Students: 
Name of Course: Algebra
Learning Facilitator: Jeff
Number of Students: 12
Dates: August 12-January 16
Days We met: Thursday and Friday
