Category: Explorations

Name of course: Phnong Indigenous Minority

Learning Facilitator: Phearun, Jaime

Number of students: 11

Course Description:

Our group have been working hardly to reach the group intention which is to publish a photo book that show about Phnong indigenous minority in Cambodia, especially over to the southeastern of Cambodia. Our whole group went to visit Phnong community and asked many questions to the people at the community there. To get information there are some challenges that we faced. On the way to a community at Mondulkiri it was slippery and muddy. We didn’t know anything about the road condition, so we drove our big bus there and our bus got stuck, so came out the bus and help each other to get the bus out. We couldn’t. The people are so kind to us there. When they see that our bus was stuck they came and help us. This was a trip that makes me feel that how important it is when you help someone when they need help.

Name of course: Water Safety

Learning Facilitator: Max

Number of students: 10

Dates: 4/27 to 6/15

Course Description:

Water Safety was such a busy Exploration for me. Our group had one big intention, is to reduce drowning in Cambodia. We had learned from data that was researched by UNICEF and UNICEF is an agency of the United Nations that works in Cambodia to help protect rights for children. This organization had found out that drowning is the number of people cause of death in Cambodia. In average when they compare males and females together they found out that the amount of males who died from drowning is more than females. The things that cause kids to drown the most are playing/swimming in the water. Also, the really awful thing is that kids die every four hours from drowning and the estimation for one year is 2090 kids in Cambodia. After we learned all of this data we did some research on the internet to check out if this information that we had is right or wrong. Besides that, we went on an overnight trip to an organization called Camkids. We prepared some questions to ask them because we wanted to make sure that the data that we looked at is the right one that we could learn from, so some of the data that we found at Camkids matched with what we had learned in class. To reduce drowning in Cambodia, our group created the swimming lessons for seven weeks. We invited kids from our nearby community to come over to our school and our intention was to help reduce drowning as I had mentioned at the top and we did reached our intention because after the community kids learned the swimming lessons they were pretty good at it.

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).

Exploration Name: Public Relations (PR)

Exploration Dates: March 10th-May 2nd, 2014

Number of students: 8

Essential Questions/ Areas:

1. Literacy Coaching

2. Presentation Skills

3. Global Connections

Description:

In our Exploration class, we had three things to work on. The first area was global connections. Global connections mean that we share what we do at Liger with people around the world by using Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and blog. The first thing we used is Instagram because we can post the picture and caption to show what we do at Liger. The second area we practiced was literacy coaching. Literacy coaching is about teaching other students about literacy. This means when students need help to edit a blog or presentation we help them edit and give them some feedback or advice.The last is Presentation skills. The presentation skills we learned about are stance, eye contact, fidget, speed, and volume. Our goal was to share Liger to the world, have more people come to our Exploration Celebration and get more followers on Instagram.

Exploration Name: Refuse Plastic

Name of Facilitator: Max

Number of students:12

In our Refuse Plastic group we have learned many thing about plastics. To  know about the plastics the first day we came to class we did the experiment with our self. That experiment was to carry the big plastics bag around for one week to know how much plastics that we made. Then after one week we came together at put all the plastics into a big pile and see how much that we made. We found out that all of us made 192 gram in one week. It was a lot because we had 13 people in our group and the plastics was not so heavy so we could say that is was a lot.  We found out what is the problem that plastics can make to people that use them. We knew the problem that the plastics make is after people use the plastics they just throw them away because the plastics is easy to get and it cheap for them. Other reason was people have no ideas to make the plastics become the reuseable things. So when people don’t have an ideas about the plastics like this the strategy that they would do was burn, bury, throw them away and use the rubbish truck. All of these things are not so good because if we burn it will make the pollution. The problem would be have the climate change, acid rain, make people sick, make the world hot  and if we burn at some place like near the road or some thing so it can make the traffic accident because when the people ride on the road they can’t see because of the smoke. If people bury them it will be bad for soil so we can’t grow the plants ,the chemical come out from the plastics and they go to the plants. Other thing was throw the plastics it still not good for the soil and some time when the animals eat them they can make the animals die and it taking along time to melt so that would be bad for environment too. They are also smelly and bad for our health. The last thing was rubbish truck we use them to take our rubbish away but it just good for your place but they still put them in the landfill so they would need the place to put all the rubbish that collect every day. So if we don’t want that problem to have so we have to use the less plastics and if you can’t do that just use the bag that make out of the fabric or the eco friendly bags. But if you still use so just take them to make something new if you can or use them again and again a lot of times as you can. These what I learned from this exploration. To know more about the plastics we went on the trip to BKK market and City Mall market. We went there to survey some of the sellers and the customers. When we went to BKK we saw that when they place use the plastics was they use less packaging and they sell the thing in the open place and at the City Mall we saw all nearly all the thing were packaging by plastic. We thought we want to use less plastic so we use less packaging but we have to thing for our health. Between both or them which one was the best. But at BKK market was not too bad because the thing put in open place but there is no flies flying around. So it up on the customer to be decide by their self about if you care about you health and want to use less plastics. After that we went to CINTRI is the place that help collect the rubbish. So we went there to learned about the plastics. The other places that we went was the community and we asked some questions to the villagers and they all said the strategy that they use for their plastics after they don’t need to use them more so they just take them to throw and burn was the most thing with out of think about what problem going to happen for them at the future. For us after we collected the data we tried to think the strategy to reduce the plastic so we made the things out of the plastics that we don’t need to use them anymore.  

Exploration Name: Khmer Architecture

Exploration Date: November 20-January 17

Number of students: 12

Essential Questions/areas:

(1) What is the meaning of architecture?

(2) What information should I know about architecture?

(3) What does Khmer architecture look like?

(4) What are the differences between ancient and modern architecture?

(5) How do we create architecture?

Description:

Architecture is the process of planning, designing and constructing. When we work on architecture with these three things we have to think about durability, utility, and beauty. So in our Exploration we learned about architecture in Cambodia. For example: in Cambodia there are many houses, buildings and also the temples. The Khmer architecture was different than the other countries because like the Angkor Wat is made from the big rocks and the foundation that they built is layers of rocks and sand. But in the other countries, like in the U.S.A, there are not really the buildings that have the foundation like that. Before, the buildings in Cambodia were not that big. The houses were also not that big and were not made from cement like right now. Now when they make the houses, they put many colors and many styles that they want. But at the past, the Khmer buildings were not too big and did not have many styles like now. Just the temples had many styles that Khmer ancestors made by hand with the big rocks. On the big rocks they made the big sculptures that showed about Khmer history. To do the architecture we have to follow the theory of architecture and do it step by step. In this group we went on the trip to Siem Reap to learn how did the Khmer ancestors built the temples. Other than that we also went to some places in Phnom Penh. We went to Central Market, Olympic Stadium and PPIT. That is the school that teaches about the architecture.

For more information:

Exploration Name: Liger Water System

Exploration Dates: August 12 – September 26

Number of Students: 12

Description:

In our water group we learned about the pH of water. The full words of pH is Percent Hydrogen. That is the kind of scale that people use to measure the acids and bases. The scale of pH is 0-14. From 0-7 is acidic, 7-14 is basic and 7 is neutral. The hydrogen (H+) is acid and hydroxide (OH-) is base. When we learned about pH we did the experiment with 13 liquid things. For ex: the coca-cola and pond water. The coca-cola was 2.0 so it means acidic. If we drink it a lot like every day we would get sick but if we drink in 1 week only 1 it will be good. The pond was 10.0 so it means basic and if it has a lot of basic like this it also not good for our health either. So we can eat or drink only higher than 7 to 9 or lower than 7 to 5, so it not really have many bases or acids. In this class we also studied about algae. Algae is the kind of plants that live in water and it uses the sun as it food. When this plant lives in water it will make water become basic. We studied our own pond at Liger to learn about this. One other thing that we learned was the water cycle. We learned when the sun rises then it does the evaporation with water. When water goes up it is not yet become the clouds but when the temperature is cool then it makes condensation so it becomes the cloud. When the cloud in the sky catches the cool temperature it will become the rain again. To learn about water we went on the trip to RDI. RDI is the place that makes the water filters to sell. One thing that we learned from there is why they made this RDI place because they saw that some people here don’t have the clean water to drink so they can buy it to get the filter and clean for them. Another reason is when they sell the water filter they sell as cheaply as they can to help the people in Cambodia.

Visit our blog: http://ligerwater.wordpress.com/