Category: Latest Post

Name of course: Cambodian Economy

Learning Facilitator: Jeff

Number of Students: 12

Dates: November 24- February 6

Course Description:

During this Exploration round I learned many things about different sectors in Cambodia. I learned that in the economy there are three different sectors. They are primary sector, secondary sector and service. We can also use other words instead of those words: they are agriculture, industry and services. The primary sector takes the raw materials that haven’t transformed yet. The secondary sector transforms the raw materials into goods. Last but not least services provide the services to the consumers. Besides those three things we also read some articles about the economics in Cambodia in the present and also in the past. They were so challenging for us because the English is not for us kids that are still learning English, so we needed to try really hard with that. We have also done some research about the different sectors in Cambodia now. We found out that the problem in Cambodia now is that our products are hard to export to the international markets because our products are not in the high quality enough for what the market wants. If we can’t export lots of things, so they will be a big issue for our economy because our country can’t make any income to develop our country. It is really difficult for our country to find money because we are still a developing country. At the start of our Exploration we had an intention. We are going to publish a book about the Cambodian Economy. According to our data that we collected from the internet and many different books, but the information aren’t enough for us to publish a book yet, so we are also goes to many different trips to get more idea.

Exploration Name: Culture Shock

Exploration Dates: October 6 – November 21

Number of Students: 13

Essential Questions:

What are the Khmer Beliefs?
What ceremonies do Cambodians always celebrate?
What is culture shock?
How do visitors to Cambodia feel when they get here and what can we do to help them?

Description:

Culture Shock is the Exploration that studied the culture in Cambodia. We learned about Khmer Beliefs, General Etiquette in Cambodia and Khmer Ceremonies. To learn more about these things we also did the research on the internet to get more ideas. There are many religions in Cambodia and the religion that nearly all of Cambodians believe in is Buddhism. In Buddhism we believe that when people do the bad thing they will go to hell when they die and they will stay in hell until their bad things are paid. Besides this if people do the good things, when they die they will go to heaven or when there is the next life they can (be) born in the rich family. We also learned about the Khmer Ceremonies. There are: Wedding ceremony, Funeral, Water festival and so on. Water Festival is the ceremony used to celebrate the past because Khmer ancestors used to be at war with other countries. So to help them when they were at war, the king made up this ceremony to help the soldiers feel stronger when they rode on the boat to fight. Cambodian culture also has traditional clothes for each ceremony. When people attend the funeral they should wear the white shirt with the skirt or pants. To be sure with the things that we learned, we also went to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat, different temples, and the sculptures on the walls.

Exploration Name: Forest Ecology

Exploration Dates: Oct 7th – Nov 19th

Number of students: 12

Essential Questions:

(1) What is an ecosystem?

(2) What is a natural resource?

Description: An ecosystem is the living things and the non-living things connecting with each other. The one example is algae. Algae take the sunlight for food and fish eat algae and then people eat fish. This is one connection. In Ecosystems class we had a journey book to take notes or write keywords that we don’t know what that word means. In Ecology class the first topic that we learned was tropical forest. We did not just learn only tropical forests but we also learned a lot of kinds of forests like conifers and others. A tropical forest is the forest that has rain a lot all year. We also learned about ecological relationships. Ecological relationships mean that one organism and another organism connect with each other. Ecological relationships are divided in five parts. They are parasitism, commensalism, predator-prey, mutualism and competition. Our Ecology group went to Mondulkiri province to study there. We spent six days at Mondolkiri. We met a lot of people like Bunong people. On Saturday we came back to our school and we shared what we learned.

Visit our blog: https://ligerforestecology.wordpress.com/ 

Name of course: Entrepreneurship

Learning Facilitator: Kichong

Number of Students: 13

Dates: August 13 – Oct 3

Course Description:

In our Entrepreneurship Exploration, we learned many things about business and also about 3D printing machines.
To make a business:
People have to come up with an idea (to know what business that they want to work on)
To come up with an idea, you have to know what people need, so you can make the thing that relates to what they want or what they need.
To know what your customers want you can do the research by: asking people, researching, looking up on the internet, reading the books, newspapers, magazines, watching television and many other things.
When you get ideas you have to think about what should you make to sell to fit with people’s problem, so you can sell your product a lot and get a lot of benefits.
After you make it you can try to use it first to see if it has the good quality or not because if you sell the product that doesn’t have the high quality you can’t sell it for the high price and also your customers will not buy your product anymore because it is not good.
When you sell your product if you can you should let the customers give you feedback about what you should change.
If you can you should make changes for them, so you can attract more customers and make more money.
You also have to think about competitors because it is not just you making that thing, so you also need to make your product better than them or more special than them, so you will make more money.
If you sell for the first time sometimes you can’t get the benefits at the beginning, but it takes a long time to get the benefit. So just keep going, don’t give up because the business will not always give you the benefits at first. Sometimes it goes down, but it can also go back up too.
If you wait for a long time and still no one buys you need to think about your product: why don’t people need it? Maybe sometimes people don’t know about it or they don’t like it. So you need to know what you should do to solve the problems.
When your business is successful you can improve it more or make the new thing to get more benefits.

The things about 3D printing machines that I have learned was this is the kind of machine that can print the material out of plastic. Like if I want to make a cup I just build that shape in Sketchup or the other app called 123D Design. Then I just connect that to the machine and it will print that shape for me. My team came up with many different ideas, but we decided to choose an idea about pencil cases. We divided the team up to work in many different jobs for our business. We also had some trips to some schools to sell our products and our business was successful because we sold many of them and we made about $100. To let more people know about our products we also created a blog to share to people. We named our product the Cambodia Pencil Case (CPC).