Nesa Khoun is our Child development coordinator and librarian, she is also a Science teacher at JWOC.
Did you know that almost everything around us is the result of Science? People live with science everyday but they just never notice about what science is. Through this I have had a great chance to go to Phnom Penh to join the Festival about Science and Engineering. It was great because this was the first time for Cambodia to hold this big event and there were around thousand people joining. It was held for three days from the 12th to the 14th of March 2015. I was so lucky that I was also one of those people who was not only watching but also showing about the kind of science material to everyone. And now I would love to share some feelings and describe about who I have met and what I did.
The place
where the event held was in Royal University Phnom Penh. It was a big and
famous university and not so far from the hotel where we stayed. It was suppose
to take just 15 minutes to arrive there but because the traffic was so busy it
took a bit longer. When I talked about this, it reminded me about the first
morning of the event. Because we thought that we just spent around fifteen
minutes to go to the event so we left the hotel at 8:30am as the event would
start at 9am. Unfortunately, the traffic was so bad. The roads were so crowded
and busy. Do you know what we did? We decided to walk to the festival. I loved
it so much; this was the first highlight of the day. It was great as we arrived
there not too late.
At the event
there were many people. I was so glad because when we arrived and were preparing
the experiments at the booth many people came and asked about what we were doing.
There were 5 of us who worked in shifts on the booth. We were divided into two
groups and we rotated every hour and a half. This was a great idea because we
could have time to walk around to get to know people and see what they were
doing. I thought all the other projects were so interesting. Some of the other booths
were demonstrating about air pollution and others showed about how to make
electricity from lemons, how to make the rocket fly, how to make a bouncy ball
and so on. One booth in particular caught my interest. They were from VSO. They
made science books by combining experiments from grade 7 to grade 9 and
moreover there was a great teacher at the booth to show about science experiment.
He showed us about an illusion with candles and the difference between strong
acids and weak acids.
At our booth we had three projects to show. First, it was
about the Lego Kits activity, second about how to see the difference between
animal cells and plant cells through the microscope and third about the density
of water. What we did was great because there were many people interested in
Lego kits and the microscope. Most of them have never seen it before. I was
glad because we showed them new things and let them to try the new things that
they have never known.
What is more, to make participants
more interested they had invited high ranking officers to come and open the
festival. And to create some fun they had some competition games and invited a
famous singer to sing in the event. Her name is Laura Mam. There was a show of
breaking dance as well. I really like it. Both dancers danced so well with the
action of the robot.
Finally, I
would love to say that this was a great opportunity for me to learn something
new. It is also called Science as Science is the way of learning something new
around us and it is very important for each life.
Furthermore, it helps me more in teaching science at JWOC by giving me
new and good ideas in teaching science.
