What is Project Utopia
Project Utopia is a project that the year seven cohort had been assigned. The aim of the project was to create a utopia (that is a perfect society) with your group and then present it on presentation night. This covered a lot of subjects as there were a lot of parts to it and it took a long time but on the 18th of September, we presented the project to visiting parents and grandparents. This was very hard but fun so here is my reflection of this experience.
The Process
The process of this Utopia Project started with reading The Giver in English which taught us about Utopias and Dystopias which was something really important for this project as it is about a utopia. Then in science, we started learning about sustainability and made a sustainable house where we learnt a lot about how we should make our houses. After that there was Hass, This taught us about livability factors and what types of things would make countries more and less livable. This helped as it showed us some things that we could focus on so our utopia will be very livable. Then also in Hass, we made individual utopias. These were only drawn and were not as big of a project but helped us understand a lot more about utopias and what we would be doing. After all of that, in InnovatED we started to create our utopias. My group used CoSpaces to build our model. Creating the cities consisted of planning, learning about global goals and gaining accreditation for them, and constructing the cities. While this was happening in Hass we started learning about civics and citizenship. This knowledge helped us learn more about how government works so that we could make better decisions about our government structure. After that, in Hass, we learnt about constitutions and wrote one for our utopia. Lastly in English our group presented a little presentation about our city. This gave us some feedback for the presentation afternoon and gave us an idea about what the presentation would be like. After all this, we finally got onto the presentation.
The Presentation
On the 18th of September, we were all finished and were ready to present. Eventually, they opened the doors and parents started coming in. As the evening went on parents and family would come up to our table and we would tell them about our utopia. We talked about our reasons for certain parts of our utopia, such as green power, community interaction, sustainability, quality education, and community services. Guests would ask questions and we would respond. I think our group did well as we were able to respond to all the questions with good detail and clarity. Some of the questions were a bit hard to answer (such as “where does the money come from to build the utopia?”) but most of the questions we had already thought of. The presentation went for a long time but in the end, everyone felt accomplished and proud of what they did.
My Utopia
My group consisted of Seth, Ayneschkanna, and me. I think we did well with our utopia as our utopia was very sustainable and had some amazing features like having 60% green areas,
My Reflection
Learning area connections:
I think that this is connected to a lot of different learning areas. The first one that comes to mind is science because we learnt about sustainability and made sustainable houses. We implemented the sustainable houses into our community and some people even brought a house for the showcase. Another one was English as we read The Giver which was about living in a utopia. This was the first thing we did that had anything to with utopias.
Most important information you have learnt:
The most important information that I learnt during this was that when you think outside the box you think of some ideas that work. Even if this idea is way too expensive or big to do because you don’t have to pay for it or build it so you can do it.
What you enjoyed the most:
Something that I enjoyed the most was being able to think freely without there being certain things that you have to do. There was only a brief goal saying that you needed to make a utopia but everything else you could do however you wanted to and you made your own decisions.
What aspects did you find most challenging:
Probably working as a team. Some decisions that you thought were good your team may not have liked. Also sometimes they can get angry because their idea didn`t make it into the final product. Although this was quite challenging, without the team I would have struggled a lot.
What would I do differently:
Next time what I might do differently is I might try to focus on gaining accreditation more than the building because in the end we didn`t have that many accreditations and we wanted to get more. Another thing that I would do differently is to maybe do a physical model instead of one on CoSpaces because on CoSpaces there is only a certain amount of things that you can build, but for a physical model, you can build whatever you want.