During the last few weeks of Term 3, the Year 10 HASS cohort began their long end-of-year project. This task gives us the opportunity to, either in a group or individually, explore any Humanities related topic and present our research in any medium to our parents and visitors 8 weeks later. My group consists of members who are all very interested in law so, naturally, we chose to undertake a project in Civics & Citizenship.

We are researching how a criminal trial runs in an Australian Court and the processes within such as cross-examinations and court proceedings. The final product we’d like to make is a shortened mock trial following a fabricated murder case with all the required and relevant information. We will script all parts of it and use it as an interactive presentation for the audience at the exhibition to partake in through roles as court orderly or witnesses. Another interactive part of the presentation will be asking some of the audience to serve as a jury to reach a final verdict on the accused to add an element of surprise and spontaneity during the presentations.

This project requires careful consideration and construction of the entire mock trial and ensuring it is both engaging for our audience and effective in informing them. To break down the workload, we have created a timeline that contains the ideal due dates for the series of tasks that will ensure all sections are completed and so all team members are aware of their workloads. This timeline clearly outlines all the steps we have taken towards completing this project:

A basic breakdown of each task completed so far:

1. Filling in the first page of the project booklet
   The first page of the project booklet consists of a series of questions that our group had to answer to begin the project with a clear end goal in mind. It asked us of what our area of interest is, what essential question we’d like to answer and what capabilities we would need to employ during the project.
2. Timeline started (referring to the timeline itself)
3. Basic narrative for trial
   Discussing and deciding on a narrative we would base our trial on was a key task to complete as it determined if the resources we visited were of relevance to our ideal end goal. Key parts of the narrative we finalised was the general case and the timeline it followed and what kind of evidence could be presented in support of each side.
4. 10 (of 10) annotated bibliographies completed
   A major component of this project was the requirement of us to present evidence of our research in an organised format. We were required to find and cite at least 10 sources, summarise them and their content and then evalute the usefulness and relevance of the source in answering our essential question.
   An example of one of the sources from our completed collection can be found below.
5. Completing the script with court proceedings
   To ensure the credibility of the trial, we found the accurate Mock Trial court proceedings from the Law Society and have adapted it to the case details and witnesses we plan on using.
6. Full narrative determined and finalising evidence
   After the full narrative had been finalised, we decided on what and who we would appoint as witnesses. This also meant we needed to decide the witnesses’ specific story in the narrative and why they would be the logical witness to call for arguement.
7. Chosen characters (decided along with Trial Narrative)

There is so much more to be completed as the timeline indicates.
A brief rundown on the main tasks still to be done:

1. Begin to create evidence and extend script
   We need to create the recording for the interviews as well as have some pictorial evidence to present in court. This ties in with developing the script further, such as writing the cross-examinations and witness statements so the interactive audience of the night will be able to follow the case and take part with ease.
2. Putting feedback into effect
   If we continue with the pitch to classmates on our proposed project, we will get some feedback and we need to spend time on identifying how we would address it and make the appropiate changes to accomodate.
3. Rehearsals
   The most important part of running this idea effectively on the night will be rehearsing. We will firstly need to rehearse our own parts and be comfortable with the order of speaking but morever, we will need to rehearse with a blind audience. This would be ideal because it will give us a slight idea as to what we should expect on the night we present and how we should account for an audience who has no idea as to how a case would run and what they have to do.

There is so much still to do but I am very excited about the product that we aim to create.