Category: Explorations

“Foldscope Cambodia aims to empower socio-economically disadvantaged students by providing more accessibility to the microscopic world so that they realize and aware of their potential to create sustainable impacts in the community.”

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When you are sitting in a biology lesson in school, have you ever wondered what the cells would look like because your school lacks thousands of dollars? 

Have you ever gotten sick because of the water you drink because you are unaware of just how much monstrous bacteria there are in that little cup of water?

I guess if you are living in a city and study in a modern school, you haven’t experienced these situations; but many people in rural areas face these problems every single day. 

The lack of scientific equipment such as microscopes limits experimentation, realistic visualizations, engagement, and understanding for the students. Therefore, the students have no inspiration for exploring. This ultimately drives students out of the passionate-zone when it comes to science and biology, leaving them disinterested. 

But today, there is a mindblowing tool called Foldscope which is the light for those students who need a cheap microscopic tool. 

Foldscope is extremely affordable (only 1 dollar to make!), portable and durable. This mini-paper-microscope was invented by Stanford Professor and a Ph.D. student: Many Prakash and Jim Cybulski. 

Foldscope has a magnification of 140x which enables students and explorers to enter a whole new world of microorganisms that they had never even imagined about before. This revolutionary tool has been inspiring more passion for biology and encouraging significant scientific curiosity and exploration in all corners of the globe, especially impoverished and underprivileged communities. 

That is the reason why Cambodia is the perfect place to implement Foldscope, given our lack of technical supplies in standard education systems. Cambodia is still growing in many sectors, especially in education which is a driving sector of our nation’s future. While trying to improve our education system, many people overlook the importance of science. Many students lose interest in this fascination subject day by day because they do not have a chance to get out of the imaginary textbooks and to actually explore the real mind-blowing world of science. 

With the mission to bring back the passion towards science exploration and biology, I am honored to be a part of the Foldscope Cambodia Project which put our best into crafting an engaging and effective workshop to implement Foldscope in different government schools. 

In order to do so, we have created several Foldscope tutorial videos including What is Foldscope, How to assemble and How to prepare sample slides. 

After hours of hard work, we were excited to finally bring our workshop to two government schools in Kompong Thom with the help of the Youthstar organization. 

These two workshops were so impacting to me and other members of the projects just as much as it was to the young students. 

Upon our arrival, many students gathered with curiosity to wait for us. After we introduced ourselves and the project, we could see the fascination in their eyes, and that made me really happy. The workshop continues in smaller groups with a Foldscope Cambodia member as a facilitator.

This experience that put me in the middle of a group of young students waiting for me to guide, assist, and show them was a new experience. It was completely outside of my comfort zone, which is great. Although I was nervous, excitement precedes. 

While teaching the technical skills of assembling the microscope, preparing the slides, and other scientific knowledge, I tried to encourage soft skills team-work, collaboration, communication as well. I made sure to give a chance to quieter students to speak and give the task to someone who is not as active. After a while, the students understood both the technical concepts as well as the soft skills as well. They helped each other with all of the tasks and were ready to explore with the tiny microscope which they assembled by themselves for the first time! All of them ran out of the classroom with the sample slides in hands and scattered out to scavenger-hunt the samples. A few minutes later, they arrived back with a smile and impressive samples in their hands. Some brought dirty water and some brought all kinds of insects and parts of plants. 

After hunting down these samples, it was time to reveal the secret of these samples. The reaction from the students to the sight of what was under the lense of Foldscope the greatest part.

They were so fascinated and curious that they couldn’t stop questioning. Not only the students but the teachers in the school were even more surprised by the view inside Foldscope. 

I remembered a child examining an ant she found inside Foldscope and said loudly that it was so big. 

At the end of the workshop, we gathered everyone together for the reflection and conclusion. We asked representatives from each team to present their findings, reactions, thoughts, questions, and future plans after the workshop. That was the most memorable part where we could hear from those students the impact we made. All of them loved using Foldscope to explore the simple everyday nature around them like insects and plants. Furthermore, they asked thought-provoking questions that proved to us the impact Foldscope can make. 

Finally, we congratulate the students for their outstanding performance and expressed our gratitude to the schools by donating 2 sets of Foldscope kits and other educational books as a resource for these curious and bright young kids. 

Although we met a lot of challenges during implementing the workshop, the result was so beyond-expectation that we would love to see this project grow even more. 

After the Foldscope Cambodia Project, I truly believe that the innovation industry should try to focus more on helping those in need and not just create technology for already-advanced communities.  

As a member, I am so grateful to see curiosity and the will to explore science from those young and underprivileged students and believe we should do more towards helping them to continue learning and exploring. 

On the 22nd of November, 2019, I had one of my greatest sharation (presentation event) ever in Liger which I presented about the impact that Outdoor Leadership Program brings to Cambodian youths and to me. The most joyful part was meeting many older students, seeing their smiles, and hearing that they were inspired by the project I was presenting.

Besides the student, I coincidentally met an outdoor trainer which I easily made connections with due to our experience and perspective in the outdoor field. He shared his outdoor experiences in many beautiful landscapes in different countries he went to. His lessons learned from his trekking leadership with many participants he lead helps our program to be better. In addition, I was able to inspire an IT that only works with technology and entrepreneurship to start going outdoors, and take some moments to change the perspectives from technology to nature. 

 “Do you think Humanity is being consumed by technology?”, “What do you think about how our nature is being threatened?” and “Do you think humans are being disconnected from their true homes?” These are the questions I asked audiences to hear from their perspective and get them to open up. I was amazed to see so many great responses and discussions out of the several questions we asked them. 

Then, I started telling them the journey of our project:

“It starts from the great success and impact we saw from Liger students, and we thought: Why don’t we begin to spread this success and experience to other students? In my last 14 weeks, I worked in this project that aims to bring the wonderful and life-changing outdoor experiences to students. We carried out two workshops; one in Kampong Cham Province and another one in Happy Chandara which is an all girl school. It was a perfect opportunity for us to empower those women who always fight through this stereotypical society.

I am sure they are familiar with the concept of “Girls are housewives and indoor workers rather than explorers in the outdoors.” We wanted to fight that stigma together by introducing these girls to our program. After the workshop, they were all enthusiastic to go to the trekking right away. Their smiles, responses to our questions, discussions with each other and especially their spread of ideas with their peers proved our project was making real impacts. We watched them have fun, learn and grow together in just an afternoon of our pre-workshop. I can’t imagine what change it can bring to them after the whole program.” 

“I want to have the workshop and go out trekking, too!” One of the girls from GreenLand said full of energy. I replied telling her that we are going to collaborate with her school, too. She was happy, and I was even more excited to work with them already. I continued with the stories from my most life changing outdoor trip ever that I had just a few days earlier: 

“Wow, I do not know where to begin this great adventure story of mine. It was my absolute most challenging and most outside-of-my-comfort-zone experience which I discovered the true strength of teamwork and the power of determination.

It leads me to overcoming my fears, walking through obstacles and fighting through the hardest challenges, taking real risks and responsibilities and especially to think and see beyond. It proved the saying: Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations. I can tell you it’s most true when it comes to outdoor.

The great exhaustion, 

the short breaths and pounding hearts, 

the muscle ache, ankle twist, blisters, blood, sweat and tears,

were the only light to self-improvement and growth. 

It leads us to the greatest sceneries, 

Of mountains and valleys,

Of singing birds in their paradise, 

Of  wild animals living in their true homes,

Of families of bees, that chase and stinks us,

Of gnarly bushes of trees that reach out to us,

As we trek, sang, and explore,

Discovering new wonders as we go. ” 

Outdoor Leadership is not just a typical trip; rather a personal experience, an exploration, a discovery that will forever capture our fascination in the deepest part of your soul.

(Photo from https://www.independent.co.uk/) 

Like everyone knows, Plastic is a huge damage that has been threatening our planet for decades. Despite the many problems caused by Plastics, not that many people have come up with convenient solutions for it. Therefore, the consequences of those plastics are continuing to threaten all forms of lives on Earth. 

In the goal of trying to solve some parts of this problem, my exploration called Precious Plastic have come up with different ideas on how to prevent plastics from going to the ocean, how can we reduce plastics, and especially “How can we INFLUENCE other people to help solve this massive problem?” 

At first, the goal of our exploration was to build machines that can shred plastics into small pieces, melt and put it into molds so that we can create different products. The four machines that we have studied are “Shredder Machine, Injection Machine, Compression Machine, and  Extrusion machine”. 

However, after discussing the price and our skills with our teacher, we found out that building an actual machine requires a lot of money, work, and skills which we do not have. Therefore, we instead find different ways to recycle plastic in our school by sewing them to make different products including bracelets, key chains, pom-pom, etc. 

We also went to Siem Reap province to visit two companies, Naga Earth and Rehash Trash to learn about their projects which are helping the planet a lot. 

The first day of the trip, we went to a social enterprise company called Naga Earth to study their innovative methods to create Eco-friendly products including hand-wash soaps and paper from wastes. When we got into the organization, there was a friendly staff who did a splendid presentation and demonstration to the machines for us. He introduced the machines and how he turns used-cooking oil into Eco-friendly soaps. First of all, Naga Earth has collaborated with many restaurants and food-courts and asked them for the cooking oil that is left from their kitchen and delivered it into the company. The first step of turning it into Eco-friendly soaps and fuel is doing a chemical reaction in molecular scale to separate the molecules into soap molecules and fuel molecules. Then, they will heat the liquid and make their final products which are Eco-friendly soaps. In addition, I have made my own recycled-sheet of paper by using cardboard, wasted-paper, and cornstarch.  

 On the second day, we went to another organization which is called the Rehash-Trash and joined a workshop that taught us how to make different products including bracelets, key-chains from plastic stripes.

(Photo from http://www.aha-kh.com/members/rehash-trash/) 

There had been many new experiences and lessons about recycling plastics into innovative products that I have learned. I see that those creative ideas of recycling wastes into products that we can use provides many positive solutions to our environmental problems along with the smaller problems that are connected in the activities such as poverty, education, tourism, and economic growth. It changed our minds to see that wastes or trash can turn into beautiful and valuable products that can even help to solve the problems in our community. In addition, we reduced using plastic for 70 percent and that impact us as well as the community that we went, too. They started to realize the problems of plastic and their minds ought to have cared about plastic a little more than when we did not go to the community. There ought to be campaigns or other forms of sharing the lessons and ideas to as many people as possible in order to create a big community of support.

After I have some experiences of recycling those wastes, I have taught other students about recycling paper in a workshop that our exploration have prepared. 

(Me during the workshop in our school) 

For more information, please visit these websites: 

https://preciousplastic.com/en/machines.html

http://www.nagaearth.org/

Rehash Trash

Community documentary is an exploration of making different products for four different villages in Kampong Speu (Srey Sompong, Chrok Popul, Prey Onse, Trapaing Leap). It starts from the 20th of August until 5th October. The goal is to preserve the culture and to document the villages for the younger generations by making the podcast, gallery (photo book), video and blog. I was one of the two people who was making the podcast. There is a total of 18 students and two facilitators.
We have gone on three trips to the community that we are targeting. Pre-trip was to get to know the potential of the villages and to interview them about the community. When we came back , we organized the information for the second trip. We officially documented the villages by recording sounds, taking photos and videos during this second trip. Back at school, we took the documentaries that we recorded to edit into real final products.
Talking about podcast team, it requires a lot of technical skills and creative thinking in order to create good podcasts with well-told stories. We have gone through a lot of processes until we can finalize our products. First of all, we brainstormed a lot of ideas and ways to make our podcasts and then we chose the one that we think is the most efficient layout for us. Then, we started recording the interviews of villagers and village chiefs during our trips to get as many stories as possible from the community. After that, we sort all of the recordings and find three themes that indicate the potential and interesting parts of the four villages which are Development, Human Life (the blind and disabled grandma) and Agriculture. When we finished writing our script and translate the interviews into English (we also have to do English podcast besides Khmer), we started to make our product in the recording studio. After all of the recording parts, we started to edit those in Audacity, an efficient application for editing podcasts. That is the technical parts where we cut out the bad noises and mistakes of recordings. Adding background, intro and outro music helps to add more attraction to our podcasts. After all of the hard work, we finally have our final products.
In my experiences, I have never involved in making podcasts before but I wanted to try in this exploration. As in the first time, I made a few mistakes with recording at first but I learned from the mistake and apply it to the future experience and continued recording until the end of the trip. I was satisfied with learning a completely new skill because it provides me with unique experiences.

These are the links to our podcasts : 

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCgjx7qwkAYkQ6wKhxC5ATQ?view_as=subscriber