Category: Exploration

In this team, I worked on writing, designing, editing and creating a yearbook. This Exploration used to have since the first year of year-4 Liger school. This yearbook will give to each one of us and we can share this book to our family and friends. We have many sections in the yearbook such as Exploration, Essential, Expertise, ASE, Events and etc. I hope this yearbook is the book that helps everyone to remember their year in Liger.

Project Evaluation is the first Exploration that I ever known. I learned with other 4 students and two mentors in Phnom Penh coming from Sevea. In this Exploration we evaluate the PBL and STEM projects that were implemented to the government school. Learning about project evaluation is really hard than what I was thinking before arriving Sevea. Before evaluate something, I have to learn about the criterion of evaluation. To consider the project that is success or not, we need to focus on three criterion, Relevancy, replicability and the Result/Outcome. Our mentors had given us many examples to explain all of this criterion, it is kind of hard to understand too. After we understand all the criterion, we started to make questions for it so we can interview the teachers, students and the headmasters at the government school. One of the example of our questions is:
Relevancy
Have you been blocked from the project because lack of equipment/time/transportation or logic needs?
After we learned all the criterion, we started to make a lot of questions to ask the headmaster, teachers and students at the government school. We went to two different government schools. One is in Phnom Penh and another one is in Kratie. On the 18th of March, only two of the project evaluation members were visited the project in Phnom Penh focus on the Waste topic (extra topic that Liger gave).

Students’ products were turn out pretty good! They are very ingenuity, and even though they were not brave but their presentations were really good and enough for us to understand. There are many projects that the students did such as Biology (plants), Physic (Potential and Kenetic energy), History, Moral Civic Education (Women’s roles in Khmer society) and Earth Science (Waste- extra topic). The challenge during the interview with the students is that the students didn’t understand our questions. Sometimes I got mad because I tried to explain very hard but they still don’t understand.

Well, there are 2 Explorations (Project Evaluation and Project-based learning (PBL) STEM that went to the government schools. We went there twice too see the opinion of the teachers with the project like did the teachers think the project will bring positive impact for the school(Field visit 1)? And for the field visit 2 we’ll ask the teachers this same question again to see is the teachers think the project will bring positive impact for the school.

After we got all the data, we put it into the spreadsheet program. This job is kind of complicated, sometimes we lose our data and sometimes there are errors with the spreadsheet. But we all tried our best to complete the task. Not only filling the data base but we anylize the data. Right now we still not finish the analyzing yet because we didn’t have enough time, but we’ll still continue it until it finish and ready to present to the ministry of education.

My challenge in this Exploration is that I need to learn about the concepts of project evaluation, making questions, interview, filling the data base, analyze the data, writing a report and then will present to the ministry. This is very big experience for me because I got to learn a very unique Exploration and I can use this for the next projects in the future.

Even though we are the Liger students and we want the PBL and STEM projects to be in the government school, but we need to be in the middle. It means that we need to take others people’s opinions (students, teachers and headmaster) and analyzed follow the data and present to the ministry.

Though the Project-based learning works really well in Liger, but there are still problems with the government schools such as the teachers afraid that the government lessons will not finish on times, students busy with their family work/tests in school. Or the teachers are busy with the other jobs or too much students in the class.

But there are also positive results coming out of our analyze (first result- we’ll change with further data collection and analyze) that the students show creativity with their presentations, almost 100% of the teachers and students wanted to repeat this project again, almost no money and time resources needed for the implementation and the success conditions of teacher involvement, students’ independent works, the grade number (10th graders were better at doing the project), and teacher quality of understanding and following the students’ project.

I hope the Project-based learning and STEM will be implementing to all the government schools over Cambodia, and it will be a very big change that we as the Liger’s students and stuffs had change.

My exploration is to create a cookbook for Liger students to use next year, when we move to the new campus. We didn’t started this as an exploration, we started it as an expertise. For the expertise, we were brainstorming about the ideas of the book, what kind of books, sections, design or styles we want to be included in the book. In the book we have many different sections such as chicken, pork, beef, slow-cooker, and etc. As the expertise passed, we had done some cooking and spreading ideas around the team.

When we started our exploration, we divided the job into 3. There are cooking, photography and book design. My role is cooking. You might think cooking is fun, and I am agree but cooking is very hard too. Sometimes my finger or my knee got burn, sometimes I got chili in my eye, or I cried because I cut the onion. Sometimes I got blamed from my teacher because I did something wrong, or I am being so slow. As my role is cooking I have to do research on the recipes that we want to put in the cookbook and then I need to order them to the chief (facilitator). After I got all the my ingredients the next day, I started to prepare my food like washing vegetable, cutting stuffs, and cook it! During we are cooking, sometimes we change the ingredients and direction in the recipes so it looks better than the last one. After we finished the food we give it to the photographers, so they can take the photo and send it to the book designer. The photos turn out good, even the taste of the food wasn’t nice. The book designer job is to create a book, to put all the pictures, description into the program called bookwright (blurb). But at the end, we realized that the bookwright can’t print the paper, so a member working with it on Indesign.

We had a trip to go the market. We go there to see the food, vegetable, meat, and finding some inspiration from it. I got some food when I see the vegetables and meats. During our Sharation day, we had cooked 2 recipes, it is Khmer Spring Rolled and Mountain Meatball.

For my assessment, I was getting really low- I had known that I will get low on my score, and of course I got the lowest score in the class and even the rest of my other Explorations. I am really tried to hold everything on my own, but teachers never see that. I am considered myself that I am always a person that people around really bored with and I always drive someone up the wall.

This is the first Exploration that the students created their own. I’d got an Exploration with the other 6 students. My Exploration called Crime in Cambodia. When you heard the phrase, it sound like we learn about crime that is happening in Cambodia. But actually our class, we learn about law. The first idea that we had was to learn about crime. We wanted to go to the prison to learn from the people there but it was really dangerous for us and our school is to ensure that we are safe. We decided to learn about law of Fisheries, Forestry. But we focused on Fisheries the most. We had went to the ministry of forestry. We went there and we told the man that work in the ministry to tell us about law of the forestry. We left the ministry with some posters about logging and each of us receive a book about forest. We went to ministry of fisheries. The place where we met was like a professional conference. They have microphone, long tables and a lot of chairs for us to sit. A man came and he gave each of us a book about fisheries law in Cambodia and a book about fish. We had some questions about crimes that fisherman committed with fishing and about the law. So we had taking notes and discuss in the van. When we left the ministry, we rode back to school. In the van we shared what we had learned from both ministries. Every ideas was great. In the van, we also played some games. The game is to continue other team word that they gave. Example team A had the word “Enthusiasms”, team B should find a word that start with s which is the last letter of team A word. We played this until we had stuck with letter Y. There are not so many words start with Y but there are a lot of words that ended with Y. To make the other team stuck we usually added LY at the end of our words like extremely, deadly and etc.

Let see our documentary that we had created:

In class we started to collect and write all the information that we had got from our trip so we can put it in our blog. We also had a trip to go to Kep province. We had visited the Marine Conservation Cambodia (MCC) to learn about their place. They help preventing people from illegal fishing. There are 5 communities that stop doing illegal fishing and some of them are trying to catch the other illegal boats and illegal fishermen. Mostly there are Vietnam and Cambodia illegal boats. The problem is that people started to do over fishing such as trawling and using illegal materials to fish. Fishermen only want big fish, but when they do trawling, it get all the other organisms such as baby fish, crab, and lobsters. So they would throw that away and get the big fish only. When they use illegal materials to fish, it was destroying the other ecosystems too. If people keep continuing doing this, everything in the Marine will be destroy. It was very fun to go to Kep because we had interview the villager, the captain of the group who go to catch the illegal fishermen and boat, and the members in MCC. We had slept at a place where we can see the sea. We set the tents under the roof that was covering us from rain and sunlight. We ate food that we had packed from school. It was cold, so we heat it with a kind of cooker. The cooker was really hard for us to use because we have to push and pull the thing that help to heat the fire. Everyone was so active to prepare the food for themselves. Some of them was cutting bread, heated the food and organized plates. When we were free, we had played some games. One of us went up to the board to draw some logo of the company. The rest of us are the guessers. One of my friends draw a WING company logo. It was very funny because everyone cannot guess what she was drawing. But finally I guessed it right. Some of us draw some companies logos such as INSTERGRAM, WINE, TWEETER, NIKE, FACEBOOK and etc.

Oh I forget to tell you about the ride from Liger to Kep. Inside the van we played 21 questions. I think some of you know it. The game is a person try to think of one thing and then the rest of the people try to ask that person to know what she/he thinking. The questions is only yes/no questions and we can only ask 21 of them. It was very fun. Some of them were really easy for us to guess but some of them not. Like one of my friend thought of cloud. We were stuck with it. We also had stop[ed at a place to go to the restroom and bought some snack. Our RE (Residential Educator) bought a bag of bottles with water and some fruits. As we rode a long the road, the phone rang. Guessed what, our RE forget to giver the seller money. So our RE said that, our group will come back and give her back the money. I was laughing, I can’t believe it.

So after we got the information we had came back to Liger and gather everything into one file. We had put it on the blog so you can visit the blog. In class, we learned new articles about fisheries. We read some news about illegal fishing and problem of fisheries in Cambodia. We shared our ideas on the topic and discuss what it mean together. In the class we also had created a 6 minutes video talking about fishing in Cambodia. By the end of this Exploration I had given my grade on the 11 Change Agent Characteristics in Liger and the other two. We took 3 of them, Collaborator, Dot-Connector and Proactive and the other two (effort, determination and knowledge). But the thing we do was, I assigned by my own. 4 is the highest, and 1 is the lowest. I gave myself 2 on collaborator because I really knew that I really bad at it and there are some problems that I had with my teammate. When we did the video, I don’t know how to talk that made he/she knew what I mean and sometimes we got into fight. For the other characteristics I’m not so bad at it. I got low on Dot-Connector and my teacher said everyone in the team is really hard to do/show the Dot-Connector. It was a cool experiences to work with this team. In this team, I didn’t get a long so well with a student. Sometimes we fight and fight by talking until the group telling us to hold our tongue and start working. It also kind of fun and tired and insane, but this is how we work together.

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