#TCinGC

My experiences working for Palau's Ministry of Education

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Dolphin’s Pacific! Finally got some time to upload these photos.

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He had an interesting past week. Apart from wrapping up our projects, the MoE team of TCinGC (Joseph and I) did many activities related to Palauan culture. For one, last Friday we went to what will be our last Palauan night. We enjoyed the festivities, music, and food. I have come quite accustomed to drinking coconut water the Palauan Way.

We visited many schools on Babeldoab for work and ended up getting quite the tour of Palauan history. Our boss was kind enough to show us the remnants of ancient Palauan civilizations near his own village. While it may just seem like a stone path, we learned paths like the ones pictured were built thousands of years ago and used to be used as bases for traditional Palauan housing. Interestingly enough, no one knows where these stones came from, as it is hard to find rocks like these on the island today.

Finally, after visiting some schools to set up networks, we stopped by the Taro festival. The festival took place in a village in northern Babeldoab, Ngarchelong , which is famous for its taro. Since Palau is well known for its taro, that is quite the statement! It was a great time. I taste tested all different types of taro dishes and I can say they lived up to the hype.

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Rambutan! Here in Palau, I got to try Rambutan, a fruit similar to Lychee that I have never seen before. They are good, trust me on that.

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Here are some photos from our trip to Milky Way and Jellyfish Lake. There are still more to come on other people’s cameras. We also stopped off at a natural arch in the Rock Islands, but I can’t recall the name.

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Here’s a (short) video of the falls too!

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Finally got around to getting the photos from our trip to Ngardmau Falls. Here you go, everyone.

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Over the weekend we went to Dolphins Pacific, a dolphin sanctuary in which we were able to swim with dolphins! We had a great time and I now truly understand how intelligent they are as a species. Unfortunately, I did not have an underwater camera, so the photos are currently in someone else’s possession. Stay tuned, I’ll upload them soon!

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End of Week 6

I can’t believe we are already this far along. I managed to get a cold over the weekend that has slowed down a bit of progress, but right now it seems that everything is going smoothly even still.

I have just about finished the Teacher portal and I am working on the student access portal as we speak. The way it is set up, students should be able to find content easily from their weekly lessons but still find content based on pre-conceived lesson plans. Hopefully I’ll be able to wrap up soon in order to start the documentation

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Sunday, 7/5, Ngardmau Falls and Ngerulmud

After the 4th, we spent the Sunday as a group as well. After looking at an amazing view from our apartment’s roof, we spent the day on Babeldoab, with our primary destination being Ngardmau Falls. Babeldoab is Palau’s largest island, taking about an hour to fully go around it by car. The falls were located about halfway around the island from Koror and were a bit of a hike to get to, but it was a really beautiful place. Unfortunately, my photos are on my camera, which makes them a bit harder to get online, but I will post them soon.

After the hike, we ended up stopping by the capitol, Ngerulmud. It is a pretty surreal complex, given its remote location. It also looks a lot like the US capitol. This was the most driving I had done by far, but Babeldoab is quite scenic, so it was very enjoyable.

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Happy 4th of July!

The CMU TCinGC team spent the whole holiday together in what ended up being quite the full day. The first half was spent at Palau Pacific Resort, a private hotel that has their own private beach. Interestingly enough, it is the first time I’ve encountered a beach in the Koror area since landing. Since this is a holiday, we spent our time here relaxing. We snorkeled for a bit, but mostly spent the time there bathing in the sun, and enjoying the complimentary food and massage that came with a day pass.

For the evening, we thought it would be best to celebrate the holiday in any way that we could. Fortunately, Palau is one of the friendliest country towards Americans and finding people to celebrate with was not an issue. Our coworker invited us to attend a dinner party at Camp Katuu, a US Army base in Palau which holds the Civil Action Team (similar to a coast guard). On the way, we stopped by a WWII memorial, specifically one of an abandoned Japanese field hospital. 

The party was a blast! With both a mix of Palauans and Americans, we celebrated both cultures greatly. The food was great, featuring an American barbecue and a vast array of Palauan dishes.

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End of Week 4

Wow! Time really goes by fast, almost halfway done already!

Work is going well, right now I’m working on the teacher end of the application. PHP is quite an interesting language. It seems that Slim was the right choice in terms of a framework.

I hope to get more people involved in the development process once I have a prototype to show. While in creating the Initial Context Analysis I asked for feedback from current teachers and staff, it is incredibly important to get their feedback in the development process.

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More scenery from Palau. Interestingly enough, Joseph and I moved apartments in the same complex over the week, from the first floor to the third. It is a better arrangement, but the best part is that we now have roof access. The view up here is amazing!

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End of Week 3

This week was the beginning of the actual development process. My assignment for this summer is focusing on creating a content management system for Palau’s College Access Challenge Grant Program. As the title suggests, the program focuses on facilitating successful enrollment and graduation in college among students in Palau’s public education system. There is a curriculum designed for each grade starting from 6th grade under the guidance of this program.

As a part of the CACG, there is an iPad deployment plan among 8th grade classrooms in order to enhance their learning experience, however there is no streamlined way to deliver content from a teacher’s computer to the iPads, which is where my content management system will come into play.

The development process this week was still a mixture of planning along with development. In the planning process for the past two weeks, I found that robust content management systems like WordPress and Drupal would not be viable for this specific assignment. That being said, Joseph and I wanted to use the same language and same framework, so we had to do some research before coming to the conclusion that using the Slim framework with PHP would be the best choice for our work. Other than that, this week was spent developing a prototype which will hopefully be shown in its first iteration next week.

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Nothing says Palau like rope-swinging into the ocean! This is a clip from our previous kayaking trip to Risong Bay

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The End of Week 2

It’s the end of Week 2 of TCinGC and its amazing how fast time flies (having fun definitely helps with that). This week was a mixture of fun and progress with our client, the Ministry of Education.

In terms of fun, it was a fairly low key week, as in not as much adventuring outside of the islands like our kayaking/snorkeling trip last weekend, but we still found a lot of interesting things to do around the island. For one, we visited Palau’s national aquarium, which was home to a lot of interesting fish, many even more interesting than the countless species we saw last weekend. Highlights of the aquarium included the Protanguilla Palau and the Nautilus, both considered today to be “living fossils”. Other than that, we went to a variety of new restaurants and even met some other Americans staying here for an extended period of time. An advantage of focusing on one place is that us TCinGC students have already formed a bit of a community within Palau.

In terms of work, we have finally finished the research portion of our stay and are moving on to actual development. As a symbol of our transition, we finished the Initial Context Analysis, a document which sums up our research on the organization and our development plans for the rest of the summer. So far it seems like Joseph (the other CMU student working at the MoE) and I are going to be working on separate tasks. More information will be available once we really start working, but until then, things are going great!

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After adjusting to jet-lag during the first week, all of the CMU students in Palau for TCinGC went on a group kayaking/snorkeling trip at Risong Bay, a part of Palau’s famous rock islands. Not only was the weather perfect, but Palau’s natural beauty definitely lives up to the hype. It would be impossible to count the amount of unique species of fish I saw over the weekend, it’s too bad I don’t have an underwater camera.

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It's a beautiful day in Palau.