by Xander Thomas
At ASC (All Saints College) in Term 2, my year (year 7) started Project Utopia in Innovat[ED] class. For Project Utopia we as students were given the task to create a fully sustainable and self-functional Utopia that can house people in the future if global warming gets worse and worse to the point where our normal cities get unhabitable.
Building up to Project Utopia, we completed the following:
1.We read the book called The Giver by Lois Lowry that had a city that claimed to be a perfect utopia but later in the book it was revealed that the so-called “perfect” utopia had so many flaws which helped us by seeing how not to make a utopia and what to not do.
2.We also did a project in science which was called the sustainable house project in In this project, we research ways/ strategies to make a fully sustainable house then we made a real-life model of our house and labelled all the strategies/things that made our house sustainable.
3.Also we researched how to make something more liveable and we researched the liveability factors which helped us find out how to make a place more enjoyable and more liveable.
4. We also created a constitution for our utopia using the Australian constitution as an example while creating our constitution we ran into a lot of problems like- it was too much like the Australian constitution.
After we finished those three things we started project utopia, we were told that project utopia was going to take a whole term to complete which was a surprise as most of the projects that we do finish after a week or 2 from being assigned. During the utopia assessment, we learned things like how to make a constitution, how to govern a city and how to make a completely sustainable utopia.
We had to create either a physical model or a digital model of our utopia my group decided to do a digital model. As I reflect on the progress that we made each week leading up to the presenting day I notice that to perfect our utopia we had to fail and make mistakes as Arianna Huffington said “failure is not the opposite of success it is a part of success.” Some of the ways that we failed were that we kept putting things into the model that would not work, like the dome on the turtle was too small and that meant that our character could not fit in the dome.
How does this affect the real world? you may ask, the way we connected this to the real world is that we had to make our utopia to appeal to the UN global goals so our utopia is really a perfect society.
In the last week of the utopia assessment, everyone was quite nervous, and some people were even panicking because on that Friday we would have to present our utopia assessment to my peer’s families, my own family while being watched by teachers who are grading you on how you present.
Overall I think that I did well in this assessment because when I was presenting I did not have to look at my script and I did not stutter or mess up during presenting. by the end of it I was quite happy about how I presented and I think that the marks I was given I deserve.