Animation

My first exploration of this year was Animation. The goal of this exploration is to create short animations about anything. However, since animation is a subject that will take a lot of time to focus on, we had changed our goal.

From the start, I was thinking that I will do an animation and I will be using more and more technologies. However, the expectation wasn’t like the reality. In class, we spend most of our time focusing on different types of drawing such as caricature, characters design and perspective drawings. Also, we were learning about storyboards and how to design our background which is pretty difficult. 

Still life drawing

As an outcome, our class was divided into 4 groups and come up with a short 1-2 minutes story. After each group finished with the writing about the whole story, we started to create a storyboard of each important scenes. If we finished everything by time, we will make it into a short animation. 

STORY: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mAm00pW4hKotYqVddOty66wWQovnoxjCn3KOVECWRsE/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

Solar Pi

The last exploration of this year is Solar Pi.  The goal of this exploration is to create a successful computer lab that will be located in the government school. The lab will be running by solar power and the computer will run by the Raspberry Pi which is like a small computer. Most importantly, we highly hope that this computer lab will help to improve some of Cambodians with their study. 

In the computer, we will include the 3D design program called FreeCAD because as we can see nowadays, many computer labs do not have these type of program. Moreover, we will have Edemy; an English learning website created by Cambodian as a part of our curriculum.  We decided to encompass those two main courses because as we can see Cambodia today, does not have these type creative technologies. 

In class, we were working different jobs such as; how do we run a screen to the raspberry pi and how will that connect to the solar panels. In addition, we had to find a school that is good enough to get this lab in their school and how will the school use this lab as a part of their curriculum. Also, some of our teammates were working on creating tutorials for the FreeCAD to help the users to begin their lesson. 

Since we have a lot of work to get done, we do not have enough time, so we are going to continue to the next round of exploration which is next year of school. Our goal for the next round is to figure out the school to install the lab and keep in touch with them.  Lastly, we would love to see the successful lab that will be installed. 

 

Project Report:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q6fZ5W-ZjZKGgjRYngYUGRXTN1-POTRfKLj0ZaTnTWE/edit?usp=sharing

Drone

It’s my second joining drone ASE (After School Extension). For the few weeks of the ASE, we’ve been filming all kind of sports that we have in Liger such as; soccer, running, biking, yoga, badminton, basketball,  swimming, and frisbee. After, get all those football, our friend Makara had to combine those footages and make a cool short video of it.

After finishing sports in Liger, we’re starting to film many cool stuff at our new football field. On 24th, January, our drone team try to gather many people as possible such as Junior Cohort, Senior Cohort, staff and of course our school director to film a mannequin challenge using drone. Our friend, Samnang N is the one who is filming and we are all trying to help and give advice to him about what he should do. After about 10 minutes, we are success with our filming. We all like the result that we got, it’s turn out great and the footage was so smooth.   

On our exploration trip (Preventative Health), we also get to used drone to film a lot of cool footages of the Koh Rong island and the Palm Beach village. We got to see the whole view of the beaches there which is so beautiful that we can’t even describe. Moreover, when we took the boat ride, we try to film follow the boat which is a hard footage to get. However, we tried our best to do it even if there are a lot of wind and hard to control the drone. It was one of my memorable moments of the trip. If I have a chance to back again later, I’ll try to get more and more interesting footages of the island.

The footages of the unfinished senior campus. 

 

PSAT

Just a few weeks ago, in literacy class, we were preparing for our first reading and language use’s  practice SAT. We were doing taking this test on one of the most effective learning website, Khan Academy.

Our tips to on taking this test are to not stress out about the test. Nevertheless, we should start with reading the questions and the given choices first before we do because some of the questions don’t require us to read the whole passage to answer. One of the easier ways is to follow the process of elimination the answer choices. That mean, in each question there will be some obvious answer that is not something that the question wants, so we can eliminate that one out. Most importantly, we should check for the key words in each answer because one word can change the whole meaning of the answer choice.

Another important thing is that we should try to do all the questions even if we are not sure with the answer. After I took the test, I just realized that I left too many questions which will take out a lot of my points. However, if I were to do all of the questions even with guessing, I might have get some more points 

 

 

AP Statistic

This year in math, about half of the senior cohort and I had taken the hardest course we ever took before. The course is AP Statistic, college level in term of math. It is really challenging for me because it does not only require me to know how to do the math but it also requires me to understand the context and using concise words to answer the question. Another challenge is to use the TI 8 calculator to construct the different type of graphs. Since I am a person who does not remember the steps well, so I got messed up a lot during the calculation practices. However, I really glad to be in this class where I got another opportunity to do something that cool, above my grade. 


Kampot Writers Readers’ Festival

On the 3rd of November 2016, a group of 12 students from our school including me attended the event which is called “Kampot Writers Readers Festival (KWRF).” Six of our friends had a chance to present their Cambodia Wildlife’s book that they were created about two years ago.

It was a great trip! I get to talk to many authors from many different countries. On the day, I get to ride a boat to see fireflies. On the way to see the fireflies, I got to listen to one of the books which talk about Cambodia in near past.

I really enjoy these beautiful moments. I hope I got a chance to go again next year.

Changing Cambodia 2016-2017

As we can see today, there are tons of issues in Cambodia such; a lack of understanding about healthy living, inaccessibility to computer labs and know nothing about the change in their environment, but no one seems to care about those problems. However, in Liger we care about every problem in Cambodia and try to find solutions to solve those problems to make Cambodia a better place. As one of the change agents in Cambodia, I am so glad to be apart of these amazing exploration based-learning projects such as; Preventative Health, Geology of Cambodia and Raspberry Pi which already helped to solve the problems that mentioned earlier.

 

Apparently, Cambodia today is facing with a big issue about healthy living especially with the people who lived in rural areas or people who lived on islands. One of my favorite explorations this year was Preventative Health which we have a goal of helping the people on the island of Koh Rong to have better lives. For us to be able to solve this big problem, we collaborated with Song Saa Foundation to bring a play to the students there. In this play, we talked about healthy diet, how to avoid from getting diabetes and how to brush the teeth in the correct ways. After the play, we played games that connected to the play with the students so they won’t forget the information that we told them. Moreover, we believed that those students will spread what they have learned from us to their communities with their powerful voices which will change people’s perspective. As we collaborated with Song Saa Foundation, we get an incredible opportunity to snorkel at their private coral reef site, scuba diving and exploring bioluminescent in the middle of the sea at night. This exploration had given me a lot of new opportunities that I never had before in my entire life such as; snorkeling, scuba diving, explored and learned about bioluminescent and visiting the island.

 

Most of Cambodian would not think of how much their country had changed over times because of the environment that they are living in, has never changed at all. This is a big reason why Liger created this exploration called, Geology of Cambodia which I was also of the members. The goal of this exploration is to travel around Cambodia and learn about the environment in each place, like how does each place form and how can it get there. After we gathered all the information about each place, we started to share those throughout social media such as Facebook group and our own website. Our team not only shared information about each place that we visited but we also shared what have we learned in class time. So far, our team had shared a lot of characteristics of the rocks that we had found in different places such as quartzite, rhyolite and how does those rocks from. For the few week of this exploration, it was quite hard for me because all the information and what I have learned are all new to me, however, I really enjoy it. When we were on trips, I get to see many types of landscapes and I really enjoy to figure out how are those things happened and why does it look the way it is.

 

Technology is still one of the big problems in Cambodia. Nowadays, Cambodians can access more to technology by having smartphones and a few computer labs nearby their houses.  However, as we can see, they mostly use it for social media such as Facebook, Instagram or Youtube. For the government schools that have their own technology classes, they only use it for typing courses not other courses like 3D Design. To solve this issue, our team called Solar Pi has an idea to install a solar-powered computer lab in public school and we will have our curriculum. Our curriculum mainly focus on 3D Design, where we have FreeCAD as our main program for teaching. We think 3D Design is a great idea to bring to the public school because as I mentioned earlier, most of the computer lab is only using for typing classes, not something else. Also, 3D Design can improve the student’s creative skills because it allows the students create whatever they want in 3D views like houses, building or something simpler than that such as desk and chair. We will also include other educational programs such as Enemy, where the students can learn English. Moreover, this exploration will continue until next year of school.

 

In conclusion, based on what I have done this year of school, I had helped to solve a lot of issues that Cambodia is facing right now. Even though I have been in a lot of explorations that help to change Cambodia but those changes are only a small part of the big change. However, I really enjoy doing those projects to get new experiences, getting to know new people and improve my skills a lot. In addition, I hope I can be on bigger projects in the future and make a bigger change for Cambodia to become a better country.

 

ABOUT ME

Hello, world! My name is Sokea, an 11th-grade student. I am a 16-year-old girl from the riverside of Cambodia. I was raised in Kampong Cham province almost my entire life, where I lived with my grandparents, uncles, aunts and my older sister. Presently, I live in the city of Phnom Penh with the other 109 children in the immense school.

I am just an ordinary girl. A girl that used to go to a government school and learned Khmer curriculum for 6 years. In 2012, an opportunity that changed my life completely and brought me to who I am today had come. It was the acceptance to the Liger Leadership Academy. From that on, I had lived and learned as a boarding student with a full scholarship.

On the other hand, throughout many years, I discovered my true passion, which is art. Ever since I was young, I love to draw especially pencil drawings. Every time I saw people’s incredible artworks, I always wish that I can do like they could. So, whenever I have free time I always tried to practice and until now, I had improved a lot.

After I took a risk and learned something that I have never explored during my 2018 summer break, I had discovered my new passions. Those passions are filmmaking and photography. Since then, I would spend my time filming and taking photos of random subjects that I found interesting. 

Follow my blog to see more incredible artwork and photographs, explore many amazing projects and activities I do here, at Liger.

Narrative Essay

For the first term of this year, our literacy class had started to write our narrative essay which talked about the coming of age. So, it was more personal to ourselves. Moreover, it explained about the problems, experiences and something that we learn during those years. 

For me, I had written about someone who played a really big role in my life, which is my grandpa. Sadly, he is now not with me anymore. He had passed away about 10 years ago. However, the words and memories that I had with him will never forget. 

Besides writing essay, we also were also doing a lot of activities to improve our writing. We were learning about how to make our essay more concise and using it in the correct forms. Furthermore, we also learn many new vocabularies that we include in our essay.