Long before we started building a Utopia, we had different stages. The first stage was reading the book the giver which thought they created a Utopia but when one boy broke a rule, everything fell apart. We continued soon with building the sustainable house and crossing the subjects English, Science, Hass and InovatED together.
The aim of a sustainable house was to find water saving features and energy saving features. Unlike other houses, this house has to be everything sustainable, has renewable energy and eco-friendly. My partner was Justine and we had to come up with ways to save water and energy. I learnt that keeping a water tank is really useful because instead of turning on taps, you can get free water from the sky. Unplugging appliances like chargers can be really helpful because they use over 75% of the electricity consumption still occur even when its turned off.
For my personal Utopia, I wanted my community to be by the beach so the people can breathe in the saltiness of the sea and to have good air. Being next to the beach will encourage teenagers to spend more time outdoors instead of always being on a device. I put all the houses on one side and jobs, work, education, and entertainment on the other. If I could redo it again, I would spread the houses around instead of all bunched up together in a group.
Building our Utopia was a challenge since we had many questions to ask ourselves. Like how can we have a sustainable community, or how can we include liveability? After getting some ideas from specialists, we learnt that having hubs of houses each near a shop or a park, reduces the amount of walking because there are no cars in our community. Thanks to the specialists, we included so many things in out Utopia that were never there before.
You can get accreditation for global goals when you can show a teacher that you can fully understand what it means. My group and I got the accreditation for no poverty and affordable and clean energy. In our community, we have a homeless shelter that provides the human needs which are food, water, and shelter. We also have a lot of job options to limit the amount of poverty. The two energy we have in our community are solar energy, and wind energy. Solar energy is collecting the heat from the sunlight and transforming it into energy. Unlike fossil fuels, it is renewable and freely available at all times.
For the Oral presentation, everyone had to have a three-minute speech which addresses the key point to your community. This will help us get ready for the showcase and we must make sure we include PVLEGS which stands for Poise, voice, life, eye contact, gestures, and speed. To include all of that in your speech, you have to confident and not get distracted, remember to speak clearly, speak different tonnes instead of the same level all the time, frequently look at the audience and give eye contact, use you hand to point and refer back to your Utopia and not speak too fast.
Making a constitution like making a book of laws for a community. My group and I decided to call our community Pomnoma and our citizens Pomnomians. We made sure we included laws, rights, responsibilities, parliament and how you can change the constitution. That way everyone has a chance to have a say want feels right for them.
Presenting our finished Utopia was a proud moment for year7 because we spent over a term working for this. This was a chance to show all parents and teachers our models and a chance for them to ask any questions. Because everyone out in lots of effort and hard work in, we started from a book to building a whole Utopia.
Project Utopia taught me many different things and some which I thought I would not have known. I learnt about subjective and objective factors from hass, energy water saving features in science, the liability factors and even how to speak with confidence and with eye contact. In the future I will continue to use what Project Utopia have taught me.
