2020 was a difficult year for everyone due to the pandemic, but thankfully MAP Cambodia ended the year with exciting news from our Media Academy. For the first time, two of our students passed their high school exam!
Socheata and Sakada have been under MAPC’s care for many years. Interestingly enough, Sakada was the first kid in our Children’s Home back in 2011. We are so pleased to see how much they have grown, learned, and flourished throughout the years. They are both starting classes at a local university, Socheata is pursuing a career in design and Sakada in IT. We are very proud of them as they are the first-ever MAPC students to graduate and attend university. We are grateful to the generosity and support of our donors that have made this possible.
Currently, both Socheata and Sakada are busy improving their skills by working for MAPC Media Academy. Socheata is focusing on design, creating logos for MAPC music bands, and designing logos for local businesses that want to partner with our vocational training business partnerships program. Moreover, she has begun a film script for a music video. Once the film script is done, Socheata aspires to direct and lead the production of the music video.
Sakada plans to assist Socheata with the filming and editing. He is additionally busy with the MAPC coding class. In the coming weeks, his class will present the first self-made attendance list application. This will help teachers to link their classes with a database in which the students can subscribe to.
Essentially, the next coding project from Sakada will be an application for the school library. All the books are being saved in a database and linked to a bar code label, so students and teachers can borrow books just like in any other full-scale library around the world.
As you can see we are very proud of our two star students. Now moving into our other focus programs. The largest focus for our school in 2021 is to emphasize our computer science and coding programs. Pok Prak, the computer and coding teacher has diligently worked and created a very interesting 4-year computer science curriculum.
The plans include the first year laying a foundation for the usage of office tools and the internet. The second-year to start a website user interface such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and others. Year three evolves into the website backend and year four focuses on app development.
We will continue to put a great measure of effort and focus into finding better strategies on how we can encourage teenagers to get excited about learning computer science.
Our second area of focus is the English program, we are striving to make the curriculum more appealing, and engaging. Our students come from very hard backgrounds and have many challenges at home. They not only lack parental support but they also face constant pressure from them to leave school and to get a job.
We work hard to make the MAPC English curriculum as engaging as possible, to trigger self-initiative from the students. We take great strides to stay in touch with students that dropped out of school and offer resources for pursuing their learning online or through evening classes. Last year’s Pandemic related closures forced everybody into online learning. It is key for us to keep this online learning system running for the students that have dropped out of school, offering them creative opportunities for learning and growing.
In conclusion, in 2021 we also plan to offer more vocational training programs. This year we will offer more vocational training through business partnerships. We have already partnered with a hair salon and a restaurant where our students offer marketing services to their businesses. We look forward to growing this program this year.
We are hopeful that 2021 will be a great year and we are eager for what the future has in store!
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