Geography book of Cambodia is the whole cohort project that Junior students have started since the beginning of year two and is also an exploration that I have been working on for a whole year now. In our second school year, Juniors were divided into different groups to different regions of Cambodia to do researches on and go on trips to discover the peculiar beauty of the country.
After spending 28 weeks on collecting the information for every province, we spent 7 weeks on editing the contents, matching the two languages (Khmer and English) together, citing sources and inserting it into a software called Adobe Indesign that is used to create layouts and chapters for the book. During the exploration, we had read through the chapters, but we just didn’t feel like it’s enough, it feels like we should insert more student’s voices into the book. Hence, we came out with an idea of having students writing down their observation, fun facts about the places and things readers/visitors should watch out for whenever they go there. We decided to call them as Add-ons.
Since the exploration couldn’t end as expected (due at the end of our second school year), 10 students, including me are working on the final step which is to load all the contents and add-ons to the program. Creating a book isn’t only about putting all kinds of stuff in and we are done, we need to focus on every little detail of the book and to be honest, this part is the stumbling block.
I really hope that this book will be published soon so we can hand them to government schools all around Cambodia in the purpose of sharing basic pieces of knowledge about their’s provinces, what places were hidden in their area and how they want their region to look like in the future.