Tag: featured

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My TED Talk

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.

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Winning a 1st Outstanding Contribution Certificate

First of all, I want to say that this certificate is the first certificate awarded by Liger Learning Center and signed by the co-founders and country director. I get this award is because I help to improve Liger order form system by writing some code in Google Spreadsheet. I saw many issues when Liger introduced the ordering system. I took my initiative to ask head chief for more problems about Google Spreadsheet and I used my independent discovery and my weekends to code the features. It saved so much time for Liger staffs to manage the Spreadsheets.

I was awarded in a big assembly with all Liger Foundation Leadership, guests, staffs, senior and junior students. It was a surprise and wonderful time when the Trevor, founder of Liger Learning Center announced the award for me.

The Certificate

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Startup Weekend

Woh, it was tired join a 54 hours event, Friday noon till Sunday night. 12 of Liger students joined this event at Phnom Penh and we have worked really hard. Startup Weekend is a global event where we can pitch an idea, form the team and start the business, it happens every weekend around the world. I didn’t pitch an idea but I decided to join with one pitcher and have a team of six members. The problem that we see is that students don’t have a goal, it has a goal but don’t know where to start. Our solution is to create a website where students can do a personal test (if they don’t know they have an academic or don’t have a goal) and students can find opportunities by their academic. My role of the team is a developer, but I also share many ideas because I am a high school student so I know how the students feel.

We spent two days on the brainstorming solution and how to make money from the solution. 80 percents of the time we felt very stressed, our mentor asked many difficult questions. The questions help our team a lot. I worked really hard on the website for the whole Sunday.
Check our company website. http://www.academicgoal.co/

Finally, we pitched to judges and we won the top three team. The judges said we won because the problems that we come up is a serious problem in Cambodia and we came up with a good solution.

Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze said, fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

I learned so much about business from this event even if we very tired.

 

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Teaching Scratch to Assistant of Secretary of State

It is a great opportunity to teach Scratch to the Assistant of the Secretary of State of Cambodia. I was shocked when I heard about that, but I didn’t feel nervous at all. I went to the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport every Wednesday morning with a Liger teacher and taught Pollin (Assistant of the Secretary of State) about two and a half hours. The first day, I taught how to install Scratch Offline 2 and Adobe Air. It was a challenge to explain Scratch, how to use it and what is included in the program. I gave him homework every week to do a small project. After the first week, he understood faster. I tried to make a simple project that is fun, using the blocks that he had learned.

The purpose of this training is because Scratch is great for students to use and learn in Government Schools. The Secretary of State wants to learn Scratch too, but he’s too busy with work so he asked his Assistant to learn from me and his assistant can then teach him.

If Government Schools have Scratch lessons for students to learn, they can make educated animations, games, art. Kids love to play games and I think it is so fun to play their own game. Also, if you know how to use scratch well, it is easy to learn coding.

Scratch is a great tool, it has a lot of languages including Khmer, but the Khmer translation isn’t perfect. I wanted to translate it, but I didn’t have time.

The Secretary of State wants me to make an educated animation about traffic problems in Cambodia. He said, if I made it, he will include it on his TV campaign commercial.

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Accomplished Mekong Swim for 700 meters

Swim across Mekong River is a serious mission. I joined this swim because I wanted to get new experience and my friends encouraged me to join. I had only one hour training in a week with ICAN teacher. Before the swim, I felt really nervous because I never swim that long and I was a bit sick at that time. The swim takes place at Prek Leap National College of Agriculture and the start at 9:00am on 24th April 2016. The current of the river was so strong, so I have to swim toward to upper river not swim straight to the finish line. I am not a good swimmer, I can’t swim freestyle well, but I always motivate myself to keep going. My time was 17min 25sec. I was so proud of myself.

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Mentoring Robotics Exploration

In this year Liger let the students to choose their own Exploration. So I and my other friends wanted to learn next level robot but we don’t any facilitator to teach about robot. To that end our teacher suggested us to teach other friends that didn’t know a lot of robot or make class to introduce about robotics to Cambodia students. We decided to teach students at Liger and make a small class. There are two teams that I mentored and they are going to do a FLL competition at Singapore. The challenge is about Trash, so they need to find innovative solutions that can reduce trash. Another challenge is robotics challenge, they need to build a robot that can do a Lego challenge.  Their difficulty about robot is programming. Programming is not easy for some people so I need to teach them more. Everyday in the class we guided them like a teacher, prepared the presentation, explained them what the projects is about, etc. First time I teach the students it was very hard. Having said that, couple weeks later it was easy for me.

 

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Programming Description (Python)

Exploration: Programming
Teacher: Alli and Corey
Number of Students: 16
Date:

In this Exploration we learned how to program (also called coding). First day of the Exploration we wrote the instructions step by step (turn right 90 degrees, go forward 10 steps….) to tell a robot to go to a room somewhere in my school step by step (turn right 90 degrees, go forward 10 steps, etc). We had some challenges like wolf, sheep and cabbages need to cross the river, gold bars and etc. After that we started to learn to code in the computer. Luckily Alli and Corey chose Python to teach. I have learned Python in my Expertise in TechSupport Exploration so I am very comfortable with it and other students were new to coding. In class we learned how to make simple games like rock paper scissors, guessing a number from 1-100: these are small projects that we did. The bigger project is Hangman Game which is the game to guess a word that the computer chooses. The biggest project was making our own game or simulation. My team made a shooting game. This game has two ships that shoot each other; if their health is equal to zero they would die. The game I use Pygame library to make and it need to have two players to play. It took me three weeks to make it.

On the Sharation day I showed this game to Dr. Hang Chuon Naron, Minister of Education Youth and Sport of Cambodia. He played my game with me and he was very interested in my game. He was really good at playing my game. He beat me. After we played he asked me how to make this game. To explain the code is really hard for those who don’t know anything about it so I made a demo of my game to show him. I told some of my code to him and how I debug it. Also he asked me where I learned it. I said I learned it from the Internet. He was impressed with me. At last we shaked our hands.