Situation
The 2024 UNESCO UNITWIN Data Science Camp in Cambodia, organized by UNESCO UNITWIN and Handong Global University and certified by the Ministry of Education, Korea. Five days, a cohort drawn from across the country, and a curriculum that runs the full pipeline rather than one tool.
Task
Complete the standard level: work through data science, AI application, and supervised learning end to end, and be assessed on the result rather than on attendance.
Action
The camp covered the pipeline in order, each stage building on the last:
- Data munging and visualization, getting raw data into a shape worth modelling.
- Supervised learning with Orange3, building models without writing the algorithm from scratch, so the focus stays on what the model is actually doing.
- Modeling and evaluation, which is where most of the learning sat: judging whether a result means anything.
- Business analytics, tying the output back to a decision someone has to make.
Alongside the technical work, five days in one cohort meant building real connections with people across Cambodia working on the same problems.
Result
Completed the standard level and placed in the top 3 of the cohort, certified by the Ministry of Education, Korea.
The part that stuck was evaluation. Knowing whether a model is good is a harder and more useful skill than producing one, and it is the step that decides whether analysis is worth acting on. I went on to the intermediate level to keep building on it.