For the last round of the year, multimedia class is more likely to be working independently on some specific projects that has been introduced to us from the past. I chose to work on Adobe Illustrator because I want to do some digital art, not just drawing on paper. Adobe Illustrator was introduced to us since the beginning of the year. This leaves a challenge for me because I don’t remember the tools, so I have to go on Youtube and watched the tutorial. Researching is hard. When I have question, I couldn’t ask anyone but searching and finding the right video of what I wanted to know. Sometimes I spent my time on the video that doesn’t even relate to my question. So what I did was trying to find the official website for Adobe Illustrator. I found it easier to look for tutorials on the official website than on Youtube since there are varieties of videos that are already sorted into categories for me. Even though I chose to work on Adobe Illustrator, but I found myself not enjoy doing it due to the time limit and the lack of skill that I have related to Adobe Illustrator. I felt like I didn’t learn much in Multimedia class this round. I prefer learning as whole class.
Learning how to outlineLearning how to add color to the art piece
Math is very complex. As English is my second language, solving word problems is one of my struggle in math. Those word problems include tricky words that sometimes left me a headache all day. I have set my goal to work more on the word problems for math class. I did go over the exercises in the workbook and I usually practice on Khan Academy. By doing that for so long, I felt like I am better with those word problems now since I’ve identified the key words and the important part is I did a lot of practice.
Humans of Cambodia is my fourth exploration of the year. The exploration was inspired by Humans of New York. We interviewed different people in Cambodia including individuals and families and then we interpreted those stories into short meaningful and powerful captions to put in our blog. Those stories came along with a photograph. We asked people about their life stories and the questions that we asked were usually relate to their feeling, memories or their experiences. For examples:
What is your happiest (it can be any of the emotion) moment in your life?
What is your best childhood memory?
Do you think money can buy happiness? Why or why not?
Throughout this project, I had improved my skills of approaching people that I don’t know and interpret long stories into short and meaning captions that match with the photographs. Can you tell people stories through photos? How would you tell those stories? Different person has different perspective and point of view. Check out our blog for human of Cambodia stories. “Don’t judge the book by its cover”
The theme of round 4 literacy is “Happiness”. We’ve read many articles relating to happiness and how people can achieve it. Different people have different perspectives of what happiness is. We have come together as a group and discuss what does happiness mean to each individual of us. Furthermore, we wrote some poem about something that inspire us to be strong and happy. Take a look at my golden shovel poem below.
Failure is Helper
People afraid of FAILURE
Somehow it is
something that what
Make you stronger, get experiences and the word F.A.I.L. makes
You try harder towards accomplishing your
Goals. If you FAIL, you can think of it as the First Attempt In Life
Don’t give up, investigate your mistakes, improve it and make it meaningful
Round 4 of Multimedia was still about Python coding, but we were learning about new materials such as Python functions, Python lists and Python dictionaries. While we were learning that we also got to do some hands-on project in Code Club. There were different tasks for different material and I found it really helpful because when I set things into practice, I received a better understand of that material. Beside working on code club, we also met as a team for Q&A session to help anybody who is having struggles. By doing that, we can share our knowledge of coding with each other. Below is my project on Code Club that is related to Python functions.
Outdoor Leadership is a project that teaches the students about survival skills and the environment awareness while we are outdoor. Those involve trip planning and preparation, traveling strategies, risk identification, management, first aid training, emergency response and self awareness. We have 17 students and 2 facilitators in total.
Group photo
Throughout the course, we have had a lot of activities. The first week (December 3rd – 7th) of this exploration was just an introduction week. We got to know what are the goals, rules and how to do sit and spot in nature. Sit and spot is an activity that allows us to explore the nature. When doing this activity, we take notes or draw picture in our nature journal book that include what we see, hear, smell, feel, notice, what does it remind us of and what we wonder about what we choose to spot. I felt like this activity help me a lot. It helps me to express my feeling, emotion (sometimes) and it has catch my feeling to love nature even more because I get to look closely into it.
sit and spot
On the second week (December 10th – 14th) we did a lot more things than the first week. 1/ Outdoor leadership promises. I had to write three of my strengths that can involve in the exploration and what are my three goals throughout the whole course. 2/ Want or need. This helps students to think either the staff is what they need or what they want when going anywhere. 3/ finding sources of our survival. Our survival needs are really important. In this case, it teaches me how to find something in the nature to replace my needs when necessary. For example, I am running out of water so what can I do to get water. Where can I find water and things like that. 4/ risk identification games. There were so many games that we had played (but I can only remember some) such as trust fall and getting over a rope without touching it (pretend that the rope is a hot wire). Those activities has trained me to think of suitable solution for some emergency situation.
On the third week (January 7th – 11th), we had a trip to Kirirom national park for 3 days, but before that happened, we need to prepare our needs for the whole trip. I enjoyed the trip so much even if we have to trek for long distances. I enjoyed seeing all the birds, plants, mountain view, sunset, sunrise, camping, cooking, sit and spot to explore the nature and the life without using the technology media.
sun risesunsethornbill
The fourth week (January 14th – 18th) was mainly about risk management. We learned about the meaning of risk, types of risks and how can we manage it. We know that there are risks in every situation except we have to think about how high can it be. We have to ask ourselves about the severity of the risk that we take like is it low, moderate or high. Another thing is the probability of the risk like how likely is it going to happen. Those help us to decide whether we should take the risk or not. When making decision, we also need to know about the human, environment and equipment condition too.
Let’s come to the important part. We had spent the fifth week ( January 21st – 25th) learning about the first aid staff. We need to check a lot of staff when helping someone and if we are not fast enough they could have died already. First of all we need to check the scene and then second one is how the victim looks and how are they doing. Finally, ask yourself what your plan. I found it very hard since there are so much to remember, but by learning this I think I could help to save someone’s life. So, to get used to it, we had to act in the role of victim, lead rescuer and assistant rescuer. To do that we were given some medical scenarios to follow. Rescuers had to follow all the steps to make the victim feel normal again.
The sixth week(January 28th- February 1st) was the most ridiculous week ever. We took a trip to Mondulkiri to go trekking and camping again. We met different people such as the Phnong and have done so much things that I can’t describe it all. We had longer trek than our first trip, eat different foods from different region of Cambodia, spot different cool birds and bugs, play with each other a lot and I feel so thankful to the nature that has given me the opportunity to see the things I’ve never seen or done before.
After all the fun things, this project has come to an end, but we also prepare ( February 4th – 8th) presentation to share our knowledge to the other people too . On Friday the 8th, we had our presentation done and all set up. We had three different stations such as Naturalist which we present about the places that we visited, birds and plant that we saw during the trip, Phnong soup which we cook the Phnong soup, and the Shelter station that teaches people how to built tent and bivouac. Everyone did a good job sharing the knowledge and I am proud of all of us.
The theme for the beginning of 2019 in Literacy is the search for our own identity. We opened discussion, read some articles to find out who we are. We also learnt about literacy devices such as metaphor, simile, tone, mood to write about ourselves. At the end, we had write a poem that describe where do we come from that inspired by George Ella Lyon and her project called I am from project.
Carbon is the main focus in STEM since the beginning of 2019. Carbon is a very common nonmetal element in our everyday life with the atomic number of 6 in group 14 of the periodic table. It is most like to react with hydrogen and they can have different number of Hydrogen and Carbon.When reacting with hydrogen, it’s called Hydrocarbon. Interestingly this element has its own cycle too just as water has water cycle.
Carbon Cycle – Google
To get more understanding about Carbon we had an experiment called black head. In order to do this experiment, we need sand, baking soda, sugar, alcohol, matches, aluminum foil and a bowl. First wrap the aluminum foil around the bowl if we don’t want wash it later. Then put sand into ½ of the bowl. Mix 20 g of sugar with 5 g of baking soda separately. Then put the mixture on the sand in mountain shape. Up next, pour alcohol around the sugar and baking soda mixture to make the sand wet. Lastly light up the match, put it in the bowl and wait to see the reaction.
This is what my team reaction was. After put we put the match into the bowl, the fire started dancing around and push out the black ash carbon ash from the mixture of sugar and baking soda. The process continued until the fire stop and because we did not mix the sugar and baking soda in the right amount, the mixture froze and turn to light brown. Not like the other teams, it only push the black caterpillar not black snake.
Black Snack Experiment – other team resultsBlack Snake Experiment – my team result
That’s not a big deal but the deal is why does it puff up? Base on my knowledge about Carbon, my prediction is that the heat of the fire help to break the bond within Sodium and Carbon in baking soda and then the Carbon that has just break will react with Oxygen and it will create Carbon Dioxide (CO2). The CO2 will push the Sodium up to become Carbon ash.
Python is a language of programming that is known throughout the world, but it’s really new to me. The only code language that I’ve heard of are Java script and block coding. Since it’s new and I missed a lot of hours of coding, I was having a hard time understanding , but with the help from classmate and doing a lot of practice, I felt catching up with the lessons. The last course of Python in January to was about Boolean, comparisons, if statement, for loops and etc. Down below are some exercises that I’ve done.
