Project: Utopia

In the second semester of Year 7, we were tasked with building a fictional Utopian society as our main HASS assignment. Before it even began, a lot of the work we were doing in other subjects was leading up to this, particularly the novel study we completed in Term 2 on The Giver by Lois Lowry.  This introduced us to the idea of a Utopia, which means a perfect society. During Science in the same term, we built a house that had 25 sustainable features. For a society to be Utopian, it needs to be sustainable. The Science project encouraged us to think about what our fictional Utopian city would need in order to decrease our carbon footprint and protect the environment. These projects laid the groundwork and taught us the content we needed in order to create our own utopian society.

When constructing our Utopian society, we used the United Nations global goals to help us outline the major problems in the world that we would need to address in our society. The teachers created accreditations to make sure that we are trying our best to help achieve these global goals. An accreditation is a symbol that signaled to teachers that you had thought about what the goal meant to you, how you were going to change it in your society, and the possible positives and negatives of your proposed strategy. I was surprised about how much I enjoyed acquiring these accreditations. In the end, my partner and I ended up with twelve of these accreditations. Before we had started this assignment I had very limited knowledge about the global goals or even the United Nations as an organization. Researching the global goals helped me realize that parts of the world are struggling with issues I’m probably never going to have to face in my lifetime. This helped me learn to appreciate what I have and to not take anything for granted. I think discussing these important issues is a big part of why I loved to get accreditations, and maybe working for the United Nations is a job that I would enjoy in the future.

Throughout the course of Project: Utopia we had multiple people from different areas of expertise who used the UN global goals in their jobs, come and advise us on how we can improve aspects of our utopia that we might not have thought about. One of the people I had the pleasure of talking to was Shaz Rind who is the managing director of Arra Energy. He talked to us about TAFE and apprenticeship for people who prefer manual labor. This was a very important subject that we hadn’t consider up until he mentioned it. The next guest who talked to us was Greens senator Jordan Steele John. We discussed different forms of renewable sources of energy and the pros and cons associated with each method. He also helped us fine-tune the scripts for a couple of the accreditations we were going to go up for the time. I am really thankful that I had the opportunity from such prestigious guests as these and I felt like I learned a lot from them

To show how our utopia would look and the features that would accompany it we had to build a model of our utopia. To appropriately visualize the vision we had imagined every group had the choice of building a physical model or doing an online version on CoSpaces. We chose to make it on CoSpaces. It was less time consuming than doing a physical model but it was not without its challenges. For one because it was an app there were limited items to create our world with, we were able to fix this by combining items to look like the desired item. The next problem was that some of the buildings weren’t able to load in on my laptop, but they were able to load on my partner’s laptop so we used that when showing people our model. CoSpaces was not perfect but in the end, we were able to overcome most of our obstacles and I’m proud of my end product.

The entirety of Project: Utopia was a fun and enjoyable process, it introduced me to new exciting topics, I got to know new students and I was able to talk to a lot of reputable guest speakers who helped me polish a few aspects of my utopian village. The very few road bumps that I did experience I was able to overcome and I was able to learn how to avoid them in the future. The entirety of the Project: Utopia assignment was an interesting way to learn about the global goals and to use the ASC capabilities in real life. I felt proud of my end result and I’m sure if my city was real the citizens would feel proud of it too

Me and my partner talking to Greens senator Jordan Steele John
Shaz Rind talking to us about TAFE

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