As had been mentioned in the previous blog post, Future Food expertise and extension is dedicated to working on things that we hadn’t done in Future Food exploration. In this expertise, we worked mainly wiring the power supply, which is one of the components of the automated system of the hydroponics system that we implemented. Once finish working on the power supply box, we worked mostly on the water flow system, as well trying to install the sensor that will measure the water flow rate and the quality of the nutrient solution.
Future Food Exploration
As the population increases, more is needed, that includes living space, water, and food supply. Responding to the needs, hunger may be a problem since there would be less space for agriculture usage which would supply us food. Future food is an exploration where we peeked into a corner of the solution for the problem stated above. In this particular exploration, we focused on implementing a hydroponic and a green roof system since these systems would take less time for to stabilize compared to other systems, for instance, aquaponic which we had learned from our research. Once deciding the system we would use, we did further research to learn more about the steps we were making. As more research had been done, we learned that we had to make more choices, for an example, the type of hydroponics system we would use, we chose the Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) system. The NFT system is a system where the nutrient solution would be pumped to the growing trays and to the reservoir. Then it would be recycled and circulated throughout the growing system. In this system, growing medium is not a requirement; the root of the plant can be set to swim freely in the nutrient solution. However, this can only be used to grow leafy light-weighted crops. This system suits our need for a couple of reasons; (1) it suits for the crop we want to grow (the most consumed crop in our school; bok choy and lettuce), (2) there is an organization (RDI) we know that had implemented this system, therefore we would more support and a place to look to while we try to implement our own system, and (3) it is less complex compared to other hydroponic systems. Since there were two things we hope to implement, we divided the exploration members into two teams, one to work on the green roof and the other to work on hydroponics. I was assigned to hydroponics, where I and my partner, Rathanak work mostly on calibrating censors that will be used to automate the hydroponic system. I and my partner worked with Ph, conductivity and some other sensor. We also worked on testing to the acid that would be needed to be used to lower down the Ph of the water nutrient solution at some point of the growing cycle once the system started running. Towards the end of the exploration, we work on making the power supply box and the brain of the automated system, where the signal would be sent around to different sensor once something went wrong, for an example the water nutrient solution don’t have the right conductivity standard. During the exploration, we went out on a few trips to learn more about hydroponics as well as buying supplies to build the system. One of the trips was RDI which had been mentioned earlier. Despite all the effort, every member put into bringing the system alive, we could not get it done by the end of the exploration so we continue working on it in expertise and after-school extension time.
English Literacy
In literacy class this year, we are focusing on English grammar and vocabulary. This is meant to improve our English and also getting ready for the SAT test. As part of literacy class, we learned about coming of age and write one about ourselves. Coming of age is an experience from one’s childhood that means a lot to them or changes them and them who they are. Below is my final draft of my coming of age. It is about speaking up to my family for my own thoughts.
Below is my short story.
Book Club
One of my After School Extension (ASE) this year is book club. In this book club, we read a book called “The brain that changes itself” by Norman Doidge. I find the book interesting for many reasons. (1) The book focuses on the brain which is what I like learning about. (2) The book has many interesting stories relating to the plastic brain. (3) One of the most courageous women (Barbara Arrowsmith) I know is also mention in the book. Barbara was born with a brain disability which limits her from understanding relationship, like reading a clock. However, she does not let lead the destiny of her life, she designed her own brain exercise and frequently challenge herself to do things out of her ability. Soon, her brain can function like anybody else’s, and now she working on making brain exercise for bran disabled kids. I also enjoyed reading about how neuroscientists are working towards curing brain disability or problems like autism.
White Building Exploration
As a group of nine students, we are trying to capture people’s thought about the demolishment of the white building. As part of our exploration, we studied about the past evictions in Phnom Penh and the history of the white building. We also traveled to different parts of Phnom Penh and interviewed many people including, the former residence of the building, the government, and the company that invests in the building while taking shots of the urban life and the city. At the end, we put together a documentary, a podcast, a poem, a song and many more creative projects. To learn about the white building and what we had done watch the documentary below.
Tomato Investigation
I had learned that as a reaction to the gravity, plants grow upward towards the sky. The idea got me thinking, “How will plants react being blocked from growing upward?” To answer my questions, I set up an experiment and observed with my own eyes with a hypothesis that the plants will grow upside down through the bottom hole of the bottle when there’s no way for them to grow upward. My initial intention was to observe tomato, but my tomato never actually germinated, so I ended up observing grass. With a clear plastic cover covering the grass, I observed that the grass seems to stop growing when it hits the cover and instead use its leaf to search its way through by having it growing longer and touching the cover. As, a conclusion, grass would stop growing when entering a blockage and use their leaf to search for a new approach in order to grow upward, but dies when there is no way for them to grow upward. My hypothesis ended up being wrong, but it was fun and interesting to see how the grass grow.
White Building Exploration
As a group of nine students, we are trying to capture people’s thought about the demolishment of the white building. As part of our exploration, we studied about the past evictions in Phnom Penh and the history of the white building. We also traveled to different parts of Phnom Penh and interviewed many people including, the former residence of the building, the government, and the company that invests in the building while taking shots of the urban life and the city. At the end, we put together a documentary, a podcast, a poem, a song and many more creative projects. To learn about the white building and what we had done watch the documentary below.
Khmer Rouge Exploration
Khmer Rouge was the Exploration where we were learning about our history, the Khmer Rouge regime. In this exploration we had learned about the Khmer Rouge leaders and how the revolution started. To gain our knowledge and understanding about the revolution we went to Anlong Veng, Oddar Meanchey province and War museum in Siem province. The experience at the museum was very intense. There were so many different types of weapon including guns, artillery, helicopter, bombs, mines that come in many different size, shapes and capability. Moreover, our team interviewed the victims and former soldier that survived the regime. The data from the interview surprised me. It turns out that people in Anlong Veng district really like one of the revolution leaders, Ta Mok who was known as the butcher. They told me that Ta Mok is a nice man who always gives them all he has. Not even that they also added that Ta Mok redeem after the revolution had failed by building schools, hospital, roads and bringing back the culture and religion by logging woods for money. This district also had loose rules during the regime which other province doesn’t have at that time. After interviewing the people we went to visit Ta Mok’s house. His house was very big. It was filled with the painting of the Cambodia’s beautiful landscape, the temple and the map. It seems like he really liked art and the Cambodian culture. After this exploration I had a lot of questions that were impossible to answer.
My favorite quote from the trip is
“Last time they plant mine, this time we plant tree”. Our team got to plant trees at the War Remnant museum. I also came up with a quote after the studies
I also came up with a quote after the studies;
“We can’t turn back time to change the past and make it better today and learning about it doesn’t make any different, but we can use it as experience to help us choose a better path for our country”
Literacy, Reading and Writing 2016-17
In literacy class, we mainly focus on reading and writing. In class, we read a play called “Pygmalion”. After every chapter, we had to answer the questions using the literacy skill that we’ve learned in class. We also have the book club groups, where we form teams based on our reading level. Every Monday we would discuss our book and the goal for next week also dividing up the jobs . We have four jobs for; story mapper, vocabulary finder, summarizer, and question maker, which we will use to discuss every Monday during literacy.
At the end of the Pygmalion play, everyone had to find a pair to work on answering questions from the play with projects. My partner, Makara and I choose to make a project-cube. First, we answer the question together and started to divide it into six pieces in order to turn it into a cube. When everyone finishes their project we come together and share what we have made. There were varieties of forms of presentation. There were project-cubes, presentation, song, poem, posters and many more project. It was fun learning literacy.
Educational Board Game Design
Our exploration is called Board Game Design. We are trying to make an educational and fun board game for Cambodian students who are learning in the public schools. As we’re starting our exploration we realize that not a lot or none of the Cambodian people had played board games including us. So for the first week of our exploration, our team started to play different board games including Catan, Ticket to ride, Pandemic and Forbidden island to have a better understanding of what is a board game. In this exploration, I had learned a lot. Here are the things I’ve learned;
Our team had watched a video about “What is a game?”. My definition of a game was something you do or play for fun. After watching the video I realize that my definition is not clear enough, because if watching TV entertain someone, does that mean watching Tv is a game? Well, I think it’s no. I’ve also learned about the difference between puzzle, contest, and game. In a puzzle, people are trying to solve a problem, for example, a maze or sudoku, while a contest is a skill-based competition like running swimming… A game has a really big difference because it had decision making, where every time a player make their decision it could the possibility of winning of losing the game and also how the other player would make their decision.
As what I understand a theme is a story behind the game that explains that the players are doing that they’re doing. Themes can be very serious or very funny. For example, the theme in Pandemic is to save the world from the contagious diseases while in Tokenoko is where China gives panda to Japan. To my opinion, I think a theme is the most important part of the game because once you have a theme you can connect it to real life and figure out your mechanic and component. If we’re using first them our exploration come up with below “Developing a country while caring for the environment”, if you bring it to real life you could say that in order to build infrastructure sometimes people have to cut down the forest. Then you can use it in the game, you could say if the players are cutting down too many trees to build infrastructure the pollution rate in the game will go up and they can lose the game.
Mechanics are rules that make your game work. Components are physical objects that are in your game for example; player’s pawn, card, dice…
Just understanding these is not enough to make a board game yet so we have a class activity of making our own game individually for about 10 minutes. Then we come up with a theme where players are trying to develop a country (Cambodia) while caring for the environment. We always add ideas to our game that we can’t simplify it down and turns out to be a video game instead, it was also not playable. We have trouble developing our game so we reach out to different game design experts and we found a guy named Ear Uy and we talk with him about our problem. He suggested us to use reverse engineer method. Reverse engineer is where we look at other board game and define the mechanic, the theme and component of the game. Then we did our second 10 minutes make a playable game again then we throw our team’s theme away because we know that’s it’s not going to work. We finally have a math game when we combine different part from different games after doing the second 10 minutes make a playable game exercise. However, our is still in the developing stage and we are having trouble to find a theme that fit with our game.
As we had been playing and designing games our team had come up with this formula for a good game and we are trying to use this formula to develop our game.
