Technology is the future of the world, we are now living in a modern age where we mostly realize on technology. There are many ways and products that we can develop the technology. But I could say that everything is possible to be invented, solve the problem, improve life efficiency and other useful creative technologies. This year I attended a class called creative technology where we mostly learned java scripting, Arduino, and others technology modules. We had been working on one project that took us a few weeks. Our teacher created a small challenge where we will compete with other classes in the school. So basically we need to build a simple car that will complete the task. But remember this we had a limited resources like 2 motors, one base, Arduino, breadboard, and battery. In a team of three, we came up with a simple design and creative ideas to make the car move in order to complete the challenge. Let me show you how creative we are, we used inventor to design and print it out from our 3D printer, we reused the mortars from the alarm clock that was already broken and lastly, we used the wheels and some legos pieces for our machine.
AP Computer Science
This year I want to challenge myself and move to the next level of the computer science skill toward my passion. It was a hard decision for me whether I should join this class or not due to the fact that it will require a lot of times and practices by my own outside of the class. But I valued this class differently since I experienced from my past was that in my spare time I just wasting my time doing non-sense stuff such as social media and Youtube. Moreover, as I mentioned on the home page was that I am a curious student, I want to challenge myself and most importantly I want to use this skill and my other two skills to change the world. Sometimes coding I identified it as a boring subject because you just sit down and focus on your screen to code. However, coding help to improve critical thinking, patient, focus and problem solver due to the fact that usually there are many bugs that needed to fix.
Speech and Debate
Due to my interest of motivational speech, I’m excited for the expertise for speech and debate. I saw an extreme improvement for myself after 7 weeks learning in this class. We have a few debates in the class, where we divided into two teams con and pro. It was really challenging because I never did any formal and structure debate before. But after one topic to another, I see a dramatic improvement in the confidence that I deliver my speech to the class but also be able to answer to the opponent in a concise manner. Moreover, I also get to learn about how to give a good speech with some techniques such as body language, eyes contact, speed control, volume, and most importantly the three major techniques myself in the speech. Those are techniques are egos, logos, and pathos. I’m happy what I’m doing and I will still continue to learn in this class because I value confident speech the most every day.
Pchum Benh Project
Pchum Benh is a traditional ceremony for Cambodia. In the ceremony, everyone will mostly leave Phnom Penh and travel to differences to many provinces to meet their family. Also during the ceremony, there are many other events that will happen in the pagoda. So in Khmer class before and after Pchum Benh when had worked on the Pchum Benh project. We did a lot of researches about Pchum Benh such as the history, the date that this event occurs, what clothes do we need to wear when we go to the pagoda. Moreover, we also did the research about the fairy tale of Pchum Benh. Lastly, after our hard work that we put into this project for a few weeks, we finally created the report about Pchum Benh.
Math SAT Practice
On the 14th, October, 2017, the senior cohort had the SAT practice test where we took the reading session, language usage session and lastly math session. It was really difficult for both math and literacy. Some of the questions in math session I haven’t learned about it yet. So during the math class, we went over some of the questions and we started to do some practices of the math unit that we struggle with during the test. Moreover, we just KhanAcademy to practice our SAT and prepare to learn the unit that is essential to the test.
Coming of Age Narrative essay
In the literacy class, we learned in the unit of coming of age so I wrote the essay about my personal story that related to the topic of changing life moment. At the beginning of the essay, I started to form the sketch, since the beginning of the unit I had created the outline for my essay. In addition, in my outline, I just list down everything on top of my head to give me some ideas that I could include in the essay. Furthermore, one of my favorite part of the whole story was to include descriptive language with my writing. I enjoyed using different descriptive phrases and the word to paint the picture that I wanted to deliver to the readers. “It was an early morning, the sun rises up and the clear blue sky appears which illuminated the whole community. The white cloud moved slowly from one direction to another over the rusty clay roof. The birds flew around the old wooden house, around the trees, upon to the sky, it seemed like they were having too much fun with their families and friends. Today, my gramma house was really crowded. Everything was covered by the white and black fabric.”
Animation
Even though this exploration called Animation it doesn’t mean that at the beginning of the class we go straight to do animation. The animation is a slow process to lean and it required a lot of skills such as drawing, write story, storyboard and more. This exploration last only for 7 weeks, so we do not have much time to learn everything skills but we tried our best to learn as many skills as possible. As a part of the animation, it is essential to know how to draw because when you understand the process of drawing, the moment of the human body it will easy to do animation. Moreover, for our first 4 weeks, we just focus on drawing, we want to be a good drawer first before we learn about animation. We learned how to do a live drawing in 60 seconds. What we really want to do with live drawing was to be able to construct the line and understand the human moment. It was a new skill for me but now I feel more comfortable than before for drawing the movement of the face and body especially doing a live drawing.
IthinkAsia Visit
For my first exploration of the school year in 2017 it was Animation. We worked with the company called ithinkasia, we had a teacher from there to teach us about drawing and the process of animation. Two days in September 2017, we had a trip to ithinkasia. We had an opportunity to walk around the office and understand some of the processes of the animation. We also had a chance to do bouncing ball animation where we used a software called Open Toonz.
Geographic Information System
I got an opportunity to learn about Geography Information Systems (GIS) for three months that was hosted by the Open Development Cambodia (ODC). So every Friday we will leave campus to Phnom Penh to learn about GIS for 1 hour and a half from ODC. It was a great experience for the first two weeks, we learned about what is GIS and it is essential to have data in order to create GIS.