The topic that we first chose to research was the economies of different civilisations through time. We each looked at one to two civilisations and its economy, and planned to turn it into a project that will highlight how they work in their own unique ways. After finishing our research we decided to move it in a new direction that would make it easier to present and more fun for the audience. What we’ve chosen to focus further on is the class systems in the different civilisations and we have each decided to focus on one civilisation and around 4 classes in each of these places.
Our main focus area is the class system and how they were like in different places. We will make characters from each class in these different places to show how they lived and what their life was like. The civilisations we have specifically chosen to look at are Imperial China, the Ottoman Empire, ancient Greece and India before colonisation.
The steps we have completed so far are that we first combined our cards which were economics and history into our project and brainstormed some ideas of how to combine them. The idea we came up with was focusing on civilisations in history and their money systems and currency. After we did that we all chose two civilisations each and started researching on them. We used this in the annotated research assessment. Through this research we decided to remove some civilisations and are now focusing on around 4. After that and through a group discussion we decided to change our idea to be focusing on the class system and lives of different individuals of different classes in different civilisations.
Our plan for continuing our project is to plan out our exhibition stall. Initial plans included some choose your own adventure type stall with cards, live market, or gameshow of some sort. Our plan is to have some form of presentation beyond just the retelling of information, and so powerpoints and walls of text are out of the question. We then split up and came up with as many presentation ideas as possible. Through this we came up with our final idea of immersing people in the life of around 16 different personas we will be creating across four civilisations and with around four different social classes in each of these. With these personas we are writing detailed summaries of what their life would have been like which we will print onto cards for the presentation. We would then make an activity with an objective different for each of the 16 personas. This would allow people to experience almost a moment in the life of these people. If they enjoy it they can try how 15 other personas would have lived. After we’ve made the cards we would come up with the activities and then get peers not in our group to try each of them out to ensure they are quick and easy to understand. We would then sort out our roles in each of these activities for the day so we can efficiently run through as many participants as possible on the night.