Cambodia has a lot of problems, at the same time we will also have a lot of solutions for it. As a citizen of Cambodia, I really wants to make Cambodia to a better place. Changing Cambodia isn’t a easy, but we could take a baby steps to make a big change and try our best. For this year, I done and doing with some projects or Exploration that might or will changing Cambodia. Other than projects, I educated my family to change their habit, I taught others what I know, I practice good habit and I discussed with others what we could change Cambodia.
Bus Application
Big problems right now is traffic jam and traffic accidents. To reduce traffic jam, the City Hall of Phnom Penh launched city buses for serving passenger in the city. It started on September 2014 and a lot of people love this service because it only charged 1500 Riel per way. It is free for students. Some people didn’t ride on the bus. They use their vehicles like motors or cars because they have get to places quickly. We saw one problem from bus passenger. The passengers don’t know where is the bus right now and when it gonna arrive the station. They need to wait for the bus at the station. If there is traffic jam they might need to wait for a long of time. Some buses are quicker and some are slower, it depends on the traffic. It’s boring and waste their time. If they know where is the bus, they will longer get bored, they could be ready, hurry or wait at their house. Here is the good news, this problem is solving, my coding team are making a bus application, so it can helps passengers to know where is the nearest bus. Our application feature is we can use with any phone by just use text message. Not everyone has smartphone or Internet. If the passenger doesn’t have internet or smartphone they could send a text message to our application and the application will reply back the best bus for them. Our application base on the community. The bus drivers need to update bus location and status. We will add more feature, like GPS for calculate distance and easiest for drivers, voice command, multiple languages for passengers, Voicecall for those don’t know how to read our right. The application will help a lot of people in Cambodia. It will save their time, save their money, save the gas, reduce exhausted gas produced by cars and motors, reduce traffic jam and reduce traffic accident. This application would change Cambodia in a big section. Our application doesn’t charge any money from passengers, they just pay their money for their text message. We hope when we launch this application, more people would come to ride on the city bus and reduce traffic jam reduce traffic accident altogether.
Map Guide
I have worked with ISPP students to make a mobile application for tourism that come to Cambodia. The app called Map Guide. Map Guide can help tourism to have a better communication with Tuk Tuk driver. The tourism can choose the location where they want to go and our app will pronounce the location name, street name and other information about it. To that end, tourism feels much happier and more tourism would come to Cambodia.
Khmer Typing
Khmer typing is one of my coding project that I am working with Prakhar. He is my mentor from India. Most of Cambodian student not very good at typing in Khmer on the computer, they are very good at typing English because it is easy to type. For my observation, Liger students also not that good at typing in Khmer they have to practice more but they don’t have a tool to help them. I want Cambodian students know how type Khmer faster, so I am making a typing application that teach how to type in Khmer. Prakhar looks at Google and found a program called Klavaro. It is an open source typing application that has plenty of languages but no Khmer. Prakhar asked the Klavaro developer for translation sheet so that I can translate. I spend a lot of time translate the application. I hope in the future, Cambodian students know how to type Khmer very well.
Scratch
Scratch is where I learned the first code at the first year of Liger school. I have a lot of experience with it. I made plenty of projects, some are game and others are animations. I inspired a lot of people to use Scratch, but they didn’t enjoy with it. I taught some Liger students that interesting to learn Scratch, but it didn’t worked very well. Furthermore, I taught Assistant of Secretary of MoEYS. It was very great opportunity to teach him. Scratch is very great tool for students that wanted to learn how to code that why the Secretary of State of MoEYS wanted one of the Liger students to teach his assistant and that was me. Then his assistant could teach the Secretary of State of MoEYS when ever he has free time. It was very headache for him when he started learn about Scratch. Later on, he was okay. I was enjoying teaching him. I was glad to see he enjoyed with Scratch.
I taught Scratch to people face to face. I also wanted to created a course in Youtube so it easy for students to learn at their own time. It very honor for me to created this course. Nobody had asked me to do that. I just want to inspired Cambodian students about programming. That’s all.
Scratch has plenty of languages translated including Khmer, but the translation isn’t very professional and doesn’t understandable. That is one of my task to translate it. It could help students. English is also good when we started write real code like Python but English is not easy for the Khmer beginner.
Google Science Fair
Google Science Fair was a great opportunity, so I joined it with a friend. We had one idea then another one then another one at last we found our best one. Our first idea was to create a soapy water filter. People can use it to filter the soapy water to clean the water that they can use it again, but according to the researcher from Singapore. They said we need high technologies and special equipments to filter the water. It’s too expensive for Cambodia people to buy. So we have another idea is to create a bin that attached with a material detector sensor to know what type of trash? Is it metal? Plastic? Organic? And if it’s a right trash type to the bin, it will open the lip for us to throw trash. Well, this idea was good but we needed a expensive sensor and it still not very accurate. Cintri (collecting trash in Cambodia) wouldn’t buy our bins of it expensive. We stopped research about this idea and go for another idea. Another is to sorting trash by using the robot. It possible but we don’t have enough time to research and design it. Another idea is the final idea that my team have. We want to make a machine to fill plastic bag into water bottle. The product made by the machine are use as building materials. We can build houses, road, beach, etc. If we fill it hard enough, the bottle should be stronger than a brick 20 times. We got this idea from a workshop but they did it with hands and stick. Imagine how hard and how long it would be fill a plastic into a bottle. Why don’t we build a machine that work faster, easier and cheap. People can buy this machine and produce the water bottle brick at their home. We wanted to open a market for this product. So people will not want to throw plastic bags or water bottle anymore, they will keep it to make the bottle brick. We use it as building material, so it replace with brick, so no brick, no making bricks, no burning woods, no deforestation, no plastic in water system, no plastic bag anywhere no plastic bag in the landfill but there is plastic in the wall of the buildings.
Project based learning Exploration
Our school does Project based learning but government schools do not. The students learn by listen to the teachers and write in the books. The students never do a project or do a presentation before. This is one of the big problem for education in Cambodia. Dr. Hang Chuon Naron, Ministry of Education Youth and Sport school to see our presentation and wanted to do the same thing in Government school. So, he asked our school to make small projects that government students could do. My group’s job was to make a presentation about how to do a presentation and do a project that our teacher assigned to model for government teachers. I tried my best do the presentation to teachers
Trash Problems
Liger done a lot of Explorations and projects about plastic. Trash is one of big issue in Cambodia. My Google Science Fair is also about recycle trash. Other than projects, I tried use less plastic bags. I practice at the school when we go to buy snacks. We use clothes bag instead of plastic bags. I also practice this at outside of school. Sometime, I didn’t bring cloth bag then I asked the seller to give only one plastic bag instead of two. I told my mom to reduce plastic bags. When I am home at my hometown, I separate trash into two bins. One is organic bin and another plastic bin. I told my brother when go to school he doesn’t need to pack breakfast, he could eat at home or eat at the restaurant. My mom usually burns plastic or throw into the river. I told her not to but she asked me so what should she do. I told her to keep in one place. She also burns the organic waste because it take space on the farm.
Khmer Role Model
We had a lot of opportunities and one of them is Hun Sen Khmer Role Model competition. The challenge required us to submit a project like a video, picture, music or document. I submit a video about electricity safety. I made this video using Scratch. To win this competition we have to have the most ten vote of all competitor. At that time, I didn’t have Facebook account, so I didn’t promote much to my family and my friends. I didn’t win the competition but I felt proud of myself to join this challenge. I tried my best to promote my project by email to Liger students, asked my house mom to post it in her Facebook. I asked my brother in-law post in his page. We got 1000 likes in Facebook but it was my mistake that I should told my brother to make a post and tell other people how to vote me. They confused to like in Facebook instead of like in Hunsen website where my project is. I felt so bad at that time. That was okay, I at least I got some experience.
In 2013-2014 I was in Leadership Exploration. In this exploration we think about problems in Cambodia and how change it. Our teachers decided to chose one problem is electricity safety and as the students we need make a video, posters, flyer to teach kids about how avoid of electrical shock. I and my another friend Theara made an animation in Scratch that take about three things:
“When there are storm you should turn of electrical things like TV”
“Avoid of electrical things from the water”
“When have electricity problem should call an expert, don’t fix it by youself”
I have been to Green Umbrella school and two school in Kep to teach them about electricity safety and it was really hard to teach kids about it because they did not know much about electricity. That is the reason I make the animation because kids like cartoons lots.
Robotics Exploration
Also in the year I was in Robotics Exploration. The purpose of the Exploration is to complete a lego robotics competition. In the competition was about solving the robot challenge and the Project. The Project was about Natural Disaster my team chose flooding as the our argument because in our country flooding happen annually and impact a lot of things. We chose one big problem is people in Cambodia drowned because of flooding. We found the solution that the government school should have a swimming pool but to make a traditional swimming pool is cost a lot of money. We was research about swimming pool and we found out that there are natural swimming pool that cost less money, don’t need to clean use the aquatic plants to filter the water and we won for 2nd place of Innovative solution. We didn’t make any change for Cambodia but we have the solution to change Cambodia.
Tech Support:
In this Exploration I have been to Singapore to learned about hardware in the computers and learned how to fixed them when they have troubles. When I returned to back to Cambodia we conducted with two NGOs are Tiny Toones and Green Umbrella and they have some issues about technological things, especially computers. So as the team we brought their broken computers to our school and fixed them for free and provided better Ubuntu Operating System (OS) to them because it is free and have a lot of education apps.
Community English:
Community English is an extension in 2014-2015. This extension is to teach the community kids to learn English and I was join in this extension and taught English to the kids. I was put a lot of effort to make them interesting, fun and they understand what it means.