Speech and debate is one of the skill I was likely inept at. I tended to be nervous in front of people when people staring at me. This is the reason I was in Speech and Debate expertise to learn how to be a better speaker and debater. In my session, I did three debates. My debating skill improved after others as I get more tips and term. One of the technique of debate was trying to cite a lot of sources but don’t cite Google. Other than debates, this session also covered how to make persuasive speech. Not to mention, we watched a YouTube video explaining about strategies that Trump used in his debate. We were learning about debates so it was helpful to know of that.
In October 20th to 22th of 2017, I took part into ISPPMUN for my first time. MUN is abbreviated for Model United Nations, an event to simulate UN conference where students or colleges collaborated to make resolutions for different world issue topics through fruitful debates.
Before the conference, I had to research a lot about my committee topics to make sure I understand them and my country position. I was representing the delegate of Mexico in General Assembly Three and the three topics were:
“The question of suitable working conditions and workers’ rights.”
“The question of combating hate organizations.”
“The question of reducing the gender wage gap.”
My committee group photo
Delegates from Liger
Delegates gentlemen
In plenary section
In plenary section
In plenary section
Delegations of Mexico
This conference helped me to improve in many skills such as, public speaking, communication and problem solving. It was scary at first because I was not aware and adapt to the procedures, rules and usage of terms. For example, all the delegates are prohibited to use personal pronouns, like I and you, instead delegates can use he/she or delegate of country. Strange but that is what United Nations practices. The event was trying to simulated the UN conference as much as possible and it revealed me the pictures for a real conference. Noted that it was not fun to research but when the event came, I had some fun along the way. Not fun in a hehe and haha way, but in away giving speeches then answer delegates’ questions. I felt pride which is fun. I love MUN.
At the end of each academic year, we are asked to write a reflection on the following questions: How did I think about change? How did I raise awareness about necessary change? How did I try to promote and encourage change? How did I develop the possibility of change? How did I actually create change?
Does anyone know about the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen? He has been leading Cambodia for over 30 years and obviously he has done things to make great changes for our country. Many people might think that the only way to change a country is to become a president or prime minister. Actually, every individual can change the country. Every little change we make can sum up and shape the country. For me, I continuously make small changes, little by little, by changing myself, changing others and changing my community. In my 5th year of school, I mostly made changes through my Explorations and projects that I was involved in with other students or even alone. Some are just my personal thoughts for the future that I haven’t fully developed yet.
My most proud Exploration of the year was VEX Robotics. Engineering and technology are my passion and robotics best involved in both fields. VEX Robotics is a global robotics competition that require every team to design and program a VEX robot to compete against other teams. We went to a competition in Taiwan where most teams were from Asia. We had a team of ten members with three smaller groups, programming team, mechanic team and fundraising team. I was associated with programming and mechanic team and it was challenging for me but I love it. Even though some of us has competed in FLL, a Lego Robotics Competition before, but VEX is more challenging and advanced competition that most of the experience is new for us. We were facing many challenges while the time was short. We had only 5 weeks to ready for the competition. We were the first Cambodian team who ever compete in VEX. We were so proud of our team, we got a judge award even though our robot wasn’t fully functioned. By joining this competition, we displayed others that Cambodian people can make a robot, and can compete with others team, bringing pride to our country and most important of all, we inspired Cambodians to involve more in robotics. We were interviewed by Geek in Cambodia and Sabay news wrote about our team in their website. Not only that, our robot was exhibited in STEM Festival and Maker Faire where most high school students were invited. We saw a lot of curiosity and interesting from the students and we were glad that they got some inspiration from us and our robot. What if they were had opportunities like us to learn about STEM and touch, feel and learn about robot? They would feel exciting. It would love it and become their passion. It could pushed them to learn more. As our country is a developing country, we has a big gap in STEM that lead to development. By focusing in STEM in education, the gap would be fill quicker and the development would be improve in a faster rate. To end this point, our experience and knowledge we earned could be use to fill the gap of our country, our knowledge could use and develop our country.
Climate change is threatening species around the planet called Earth. Climate change is warning us with all the big storms, drought, flood and more. It would continue if we not slow it down. As it to say, there is a positive correlation between the amount of greenhouse gases and the global temperature. The more greenhouse gases we emit, the more global temperature rise. From countries, companies and individual, we contributed to emit greenhouse gases everyday. From eating meat to traveling by airplanes. This is really important for everyone to know about the causes and the solutions of climate change. So, we have an Exploration that is called Climate Summit. This Exploration were organizing and run a mock of United Nations Summit on climate change. This is a special event because the event was organized by students and for students. We invited Grade 9 and 10 students from many schools around Cambodia to join our event and negotiated to make pledges for reducing their carbon emission. During the event, we had a representative of Secretary of United Nations, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, scientists just like a real summit and the students were the delegates for different regions. They were divided into different regions such as US, European Union, Developed Nations, India, China and other developing countries and to make their pledge for reducing their carbon emission. We wanted them to see the big pictures of climate change so we had three scientists with presentations that explained about the causes, effects and solutions for climate change. We surveyed the attendents about their knowledge and feeling related to the topic before the event began and surveyed again after the event end. The result was incredibly exciting, they were willing to reduce more of their carbon footprint by changing their daily habit. This shows that the event has influenced their perspective about climate change. We want them to change their habit that would benefit for environments, like riding bike, eat less meat, turn off light when they don’t need it and more. Climate change is a serious issue and everybody in the world has involved to emit and we need also need to solve it back.
Be a change agents for our country, we should improve mind with inspiration from other change agents from Cambodia and around the world. What were the keys that make them successful? It could be leader of countries, founder of companies, NGOs, Enterprise. For example, Bill Gates the founder of Microsoft company with net worth of 89 billion dollars. He and his wife have given away 28 billion dollars to their charitable foundation. This is a great example to illustrate a great change agents. However, change agents didn’t have to be so successful and a billionaire. For example a founder of NGO is count as a change agent. Despite this I had an Exploration that was involved in with 13 others students that we were focusing on contacting the possible change agents and get inspiration from them. We had two phase. The first phase was trying to contact with the Entrepreneurs. I researched many Entrepreneur and came up with three. Uri Levine the founder of Waze app. Massoud Hassani the founder Mine Kafon and Biz Solution company in Cambodia. Among of three people, I got reply back from Uri Levine. I was exhilarating. I couldn’t Skype with him because of the different timezone and his time constraint. Anyway, I interviewed him by email and he replied back with valuable answers for me as well as everyone. The second phase was trying to contact with Enterprises. Kailash Satyathi, nobel prize winner with Malila, Raj Panjabi the founder of Last Mile Health. Unfortunately, I couldn’t contact them. All of our information, messages, inspiration, advices, interview video was gathering and edit to publish on our changing agent website. This is a way to change Cambodia. Students should know the information from the change agents, take their advice and take actions.
I’m indeed very satisfied and proud the changes I’ve made. I know I will make more changes and I’m ready for it. I felt I had earned a lot of valuable experience from being change agent. I’m not a Prime Minister but I could make positive impact for others and make them smile. However, changes are not easy to be made. To the path for making change successfully, there would be obstacles, frustration, depression and we always find away to overcome them. This is rare that kids could make changes, shape their country and accomplish by themselve. I experienced them all and willing to experience even more.
The first unit of English Literacy was about writing a narrative essay relating to rite of passage. This writing is about one’s remarkable transition experience in their life. For example, becoming a teenager.
Now, I have become a teenager, though, this not what I wanted write about. I have an interesting story to tell which is the journey I walked toward my passion. Since, I was a child; I was fascinated to technology but my dream seemed to be just a dream until one life changing moment when I come to Liger
During in class, I also have learned new writing skills and techniques such as parallel structure, comma usage, anaphora and metaphor that I have implement in my writing.
I have spotlight some of my best parts:
“I decided to apply for Liger scholarship because the only one reason is that Liger has computer programs. My parents didn’t encourage me to apply. I cried like a baby begging for milk.”
“After a year, I even receive a brand new laptop for my learning. I felt that my computer was a new toy that Liger offered. It was such an honor to own it.”
“I asked myself, “What does this button do?” Iwas ended up clicking all buttons even I didn’t understand what they say.”
“I would say my life is like a game. After I complete a lower level, harder level introduce. Still, the knowledge about computer was not enough, and that is when my next level arrived: coding.”
“Coding is very tough, messy and advance. I faced a lot of frustration and stress, but there is a power that pushes me to keep doing coding. The power is self satisfaction.”
A firework goes flying up into the air from the ground and reaches a maximum height of 40m (and falls back down to the ground). What is the total time it stays in the air?
During, Physics class, we were introduced to kinematic equations and solving this kind of questions. This new concept is very useful to understand how objects moves, relevant to time, distance, accelerations and velocity.
With three essential equations:
We can use algebra rules and formed into four kinematic equations:
In kinematic problems questions, we would need to use one of the equation to solve the problems.
Arthur Benjamin, an American mathematician quoted that
Teach statistics before calculus!
Most students, after they finished learning Algebra they will learn calculus but not statistic. Though, calculus only use in scientific researches but statistic is what most people would need in their daily life. People saw a lot of data, graphs, scatter plots in articles, documents or in news and statistic will teach you how to analyze them.
Now, I’m studying AP Statistics which is a college level course and I’m preparing for coming up exam. This course is very challenging due to many new and advanced vocabularies and it requires a lot of understanding and analyzing. However, learning about statistics changed my perspective, how I see data and examine about them if they were valid. Through analyzing and constructing bar graphs and scatter plot and I found out that it is actually fun.
We study based on The Practice of Statistics Textbook, AP statistics test book. Other than this, we learn and practice from many other online resource such as Khan Academy and other worksheets.
After finishing one chapter, we have to take a reviewing quiz before continue the next one.
During Khmer Essential, we had a small research about Cambodia traditional holiday called Phcum Ben. All of the information was written down in Google Slide then print them out as the document for future used.
On August 24, 2017, I traveled to Battambang Province with my Dinosaur Exploration to conduct an investigation about dinosaur footprints at a site. Our team spent a day walking around the area to do field method for possible footprints such as taking notes, measuring the length and the size of the footprints, identifying rock type and recording geographic coordinates and elevation. We then used clay and plaster of paris to make casts of the footprints for more investigation in class. Besides doing the casts, we interviewed some people around the area whether they believe in dinosaurs. It turned out that they don’t believe in dinosaurs at all, they just saw them on TV. I was such shock to see rocks that have weird looking holes, almost like something more than nature made them. Honestly, I wasn’t convinced that the rocks my learning coordinator showed from his photos in our class were possible dinosaur footprint, until the visiting to the site. Still, my assumption cannot be the conclusion of the investigation, we needed a deeper investigation to answer are these genuine dinosaur footprints? The experience that I drew back from the trip was immense even though it was only from a day. I never have done a field method nor casting a footprint before. Our team even develop our own casting method when the technique from the internet didn’t work. It was a hard-working, casting under a hot sun, walking through bushes and even harder when we don’t have a paleontologist to guide the investigation. Hard work was not a problem because of the excitement just anchor in our mind, just to think about the revealing of this mystery.
On a weekend, September 29, 2017, I attended a Startup Weekend powered by Google, an event where a group of attendance can start and complete a startup (a new business idea) that related to Education from Friday evening to Sunday night.
On the event, my friends and I were the youngest attendances and other attendances were college students and company employees that aged up to 30s years old. I joined this event for my second time and I gave a pitch about creating a forum that connects people especially students with teachers and experts. Students can post questions that related to Khmer, Math and other subjects while the teachers and experts can answer those questions. Unfortunately, my idea did not get enough votes to be the top 10. Therefore, I joined a 10 top idea about bringing people to experience real-life experience. The next two days, Saturday and Sunday, our team put all of the effort to develop the idea, answering business canvas questions, building a prototype website and preparing for the final pitch to the judge.
For me, starting a new business idea is not an easy thing. It took us about a day to finalize our idea. We named our company TripRean. Trip + Rean (Rean is Khmer word that means learn). We give services to schools and individuals for organizing educational trips to many different places in Cambodia. Schools and individuals can book the ticket and all the transportations, food, stay and tour we would be organized. This is similar to a trip agency, but our trip focusing on education. We want, especially, high school students to be involved in real life experience. For example, a trip to see birds in Preah Vihear and learn about them. Rarely, students never experience this, that is why we are here to help them. After the pitch, our idea won third place for the best idea and we got many awards and even two investors willing to invest in our company. This was such a great experience for a high school student like me to be involved in business and change the country.
This is the link to our prototype website I made during the event.
It was crazy to be a TED speaker. Come up with a great idea to speak about that could persuade the TED organizers isn’t easy things. I have dug for a great idea for days to convince the organizer and finally, I was one of the 15 speakers. This news is very exciting, but I have to work really hard to prepare for the final talk. My idea was “Cambodia students should learn to code” that’s all. The topic is not that exciting.
Well, I asked my coding mentor for some feedback about my topic and he explained many ideas that relate to “The zero magical cost society”. I implemented his ideas to my talk because it relevance to coding. I mentioned some companies like Facebook, Google and more and how they have changed the world to persuade the audience to code. Check out my talk of they persuaded you.
