From March, 30 to April 1, I was attending Model United Nation at Saigon, Vietnam, which is called SIAMUN. This was my second of participating as the delegate in Model United Nation (MUN). I was representing as the delegate of the Federal Republic of Germany in The Economic and Financial Committee, General Assembly 2. The topics were:
The question of tax evasion by multinational corporations (MNCs).
The question on the implementation of a universal minimum wage
The question of the legality and use of Bitcoin
The question of overseas aid to lower income countries
Among of those topics, I was focusing on the first topic, because tax and how companies avoiding tax is interesting to learn. I have plenty of help from my entrepreneur teacher relating to this.
During the assembly, I had more confidence than my first time. I asked some questions to the house and made a few speeches than ISPPMUN. I knew that my public speaking skill needed a lot of improvement, and by participating in this event, bringing me closer to perfect of this skill.
On March 2nd, during STEM festival at Olympic Stadium, I displayed my masterpiece Self Balancing robot, which I built during the after-school activity. This robot has impressed many students because it could stand by itself with two wheels. I questionedthe students what do they think the robot was for before I ran it. Most of them have believed that it was a car or a cart. I also noticed that they were excited wanted to know how to build and the physics of this robot and I was happy to tell them.
My friend displayed his project
My friend displayed his project
Beside my exhibit, I was exploring around other booths and discovered many new booths and faces but what drew my attention the most was Highschool students’ booths. Students around my age from government schools were presenting in this fair. I have been exhibiting at this festival for four years and this was the first time seeing them presenting these amazing projects! Two years ago, an Exploration was evaluating the project-based learning in government schools and wrote a whole report to Ministry of Education. The Minister was excited about project-based curriculum during his visit to Liger and started to implement project-based learning to some high schools because of the report from Liger. To that end, the students I met at the fair were from those high schools! I felt like I met my brothers and sisters that love STEM. Liger is not alone.
More to that, two years ago during Ministry visit at Liger, the Secretary of State was interested in Scratch and wanted to introduce this computer coding program to students to learn to code. I was chosen to give a lecture how to use Scratch to the assistant of Secretary of State, and the lecture passed on to teachers and students. Oh yeah! I saw a group of high school students made a maze game from Scratch! I thought, “What I have done two years ago has shaped Cambodia, I made a change in Cambodia!”
Previously, my Dinosaur Exploration had suspected figures like dinosaur footprints at Battambang Province, though we couldn’t verify them as dinosaur footprint a 100 percent. Therefore, we invited two Thai paleontologists to validate on the footprints based on their background in biology and geology.
We were all thrilled about these footprints. If these footprints are agreed by experts to be dinosaur footprint, it would be the first dinosaur footprint ever found in Cambodia. Unfortunately, one of the paleontologists was convinced that they are not dinosaur footprint, they are flute casts, it was caused by the river flow and small rock on the bed. We were really disappointed; however, I think it is what most scientists experience during their discovery.
As a project-based learning school, Liger opens opportunities for students to explore in STEM. As part of that, robotics is one of them. For myself, I enjoy building robots since Liger introduced Lego robotics four years ago. Last year, 2017, I moved to a more advanced robotics calls, VEX, and joined its competition in Taiwan. No surprise, this year I was given another opportunity to be on Liger team to compete in VEX competition again but at Thailand.
What my team has learned from the 2017 competition we applied to our strategy this year. Some of the strategies we have observed from other teams were that they use aluminum instead of steels, two batteries instead of one and Omni wheels instead of standard wheels. One strategy we heard from a team is that design in computer software before it assembles the robot.
Because I had experience from the previous competition, I had to give support to freshmen and freshwomen that were given for this robotics opportunity as well. Liger has two teams. I was in the male team calls Botjisu, and a female team calls Beta-B. A lot of time, people that were new to robotics were struggling in both programming and mechanic; thus, I gave them advice and techniques, especially how they assembly pieces together.
Our team aimed for the champion for this competition. Because we have enough materials we decided to make five mechanisms on our robot to be capable of doing all the tasks. Our robot was huge and heavy. During the testing at our Lab, our robot worked well. Though, sometimes the wheel motors became stalling (overheat) even when driving the robot on a smooth surface. We don’t want it to be stall during our competition.
After giving up the time to make this robot be alive for the competition, finally, the day had come. I had hope that our robot will succeed. A lot of people was amazed by how cool it looks and its ability to do many tasks. Unfortunately, our robot became stalling on the battlefield in a couple matches, even when the robot was moving, it moved slowly. This issue putting our team below the chart. We made a tough decision at the last minute to remove three mechanisms away to reduce its load, though we gave up two matches to have time removing the parts away. We made the right decision, in our last qualifying matches, our robot became a hero. It was so fast that it could score so many points for our team and allies-team. The moment was the most exciting for us. For the final tournament, we allied with two other teams. We crushed first couple games, but sadly on our semifinal game, the scores were so close. Our competitor team won. Even though we didn’t win anything, however, we won our heart to work as a team. This competition made me understand, “Keep it simple” mean. A simple robot could be a champion.
I couldn’t really describe how much I was proud of my team that we made till the semi-final!
Grace Hopper is known an important person in computer science. She invented the first computer compiler that shape this contemporary technology. During, Physic class, I researched about her and here is the information about her I wrote.
On 19th November 2017, I was volunteering for Khmer Sight Foundation (KSF) mission at Kampong Speu Province. I spent this Saturday to help to save people eyes. Based on the doctor I worked with, he said as people getting older, their eye lens would get cloudier. This is call cataract and another common eye problem is call pyridium. There is no medicine or drops to cue the eyes’ lens, the only way is to do a surgery. The foundation’s mission is to find those who has the problem with their eyes and giving them tear drop, sunglasses and especially provide a surgery for those who has a lot of cataracts or pyridium .
I was inept about eyes at the start but my heart told me to help my people that is why I volunteer this. I helped to register the people there, moving chairs, organizing the room. Ieventually ended up becoming the doctors interpreter and assistant. I thought this is the toughest volunteer job since all the patients I have talked to were having a lot of cataracts and pyridium. I needed to explain to them that their eyes should have a surgery and the side effect of keeping the cataract. More importantly, I need to explain to them that there is a chance that surgery would fail, their eyes could get blind.
On the mission, we screened more than a 100 patients and about 30% of them is on surgery list. I never see the surgery before, I also felt nervous for the patient as well and the risk they took, but what I and other volunteers could do is to comfort them because some patient never traveled to Phnom Penh and couldn’t speak English with doctors.
I went to the clinic with eight patients and I saw procedure before surgery. They scanned the patient’s eye for the size, depth, curvedness and the doctors would replace a new artificial-len for the patient with those dimension. I didn’t get to see the surgery itself, but I saw photos from my teacher who went to see the surgery.
Liger Digital Currency is the first application developed by Liger students that had launched. It not just a simple application, it is a digital currency system that is more likely a PayPal that uses only for Liger campus. Many students had involved in this project since 2016 until the official launch on November 20, 2017. We developed this system from scratch with Node.js platform and we hire none other developers to build this. The developers are 15 years old Liger students and this is including me. I am the main developer, coding in many pages of the application. I am a hybrid developer meaning I code the back-end and also the front end. Throughout, this application, I had exposed of many web skills, such as Login Authentication with Google, working with Postgres database, cookies, HTTP requests and so on. Beside coding, I involved in discussion and meetings with the school director about the problems and the solutions to make the system works as best. This is the biggest project I work so far and what I get was a lot of experience.
On 15th November 2017, I and 11 other went to a Tech Talk at Tekhub about how cryptocurrencies change the world as we know it. I found this event posted on Facebook page and it caught my heart desiring to hear the talk. I requested my facilitator if I and somebody else who were interested could go. I got accepted. I was very excited but I must leading the group to the event.
I have learned more about Bitcoin, how does it works and its history. The history came from Satoshi Nakamoto , the founder of Bitcoin, because one of one big problem is bank flation. Bitcoin solved it, government can’t shut down the system because it is a decentralized system. It globalize used, no need approval from the government, convenience and fast. At first I thought our Liger Digital Currency is a cryptocurrency but once I listed to them, It’s not. Cryptocurrencies are decentralized (meaning that more than one server), while Liger Digital Currency is centralized because we only have one server. I was inspire with blockchain system and how people can be an ICO of the cryptocurrency. I was Blown away.
“Rawr! Raw! I’m the T-Rex, I’m gonna eat you little pig!” That what is kid might play with their dinosaur toy during their childhood.
Anyway, mentioning about dinosaurs, these creatures had walked on the planet Earth about 65 million years ago. Dinosaurs fossils and prints had been discovered over all continents but there were no discovery found in Cambodia. Our dinosaur Exploration will change this because we are investigating on dinosaurs footprints found in Battambang Province, Cambodia by Thai paleontologists. I didn’t faith about the footprints until I travelled to the site. As I investigate more, I was blown away and I have a strong faith that at least a few of them are dinosaur footprints. We went to the site and I wrote a blog post about the whole trip: Link. During the trip, we made field method of the footprints casting. I had a big responsibility flying the drone, taking eye bird view picture of the site geography for mapping and documentary. I also involved in making casting the footprints which is hard.
During the class, I made the map of the site and labeling the casting. We need the map because it is a piece of evidence that needed in our report to validate if the footprint. We wrote a report about the find, analyzed the footprints and send it to paleontologist. Not just that, we gave copies of the report to the Director of Mine Energy and Resource and those report he presented in South East Asia Geology conference. The most amazing part is that we contacted to many paleontologists and couple of amazed with us and want to help.
Scientific research about dinosaur was very new. I even had difficulty pronouncing terms, especially “Paleontologist” term. During class discussion, I played a role to share ideas. I took also initiative leading the team to brainstorm about outreach possibility. Our brainstorm were narrowed down to podcasting adding dinosaur, curriculum to government education and creating kid book.
Being a part in the Exploration, I had exposed to the science field, and I always excited to learn about dinosaur because I think dinosaur are cool like what most kids think.
You also can check out our website we built for including information, stories about this research. Link
This is our documentary about our dinosaur investigation.
