Project Utopia
Project Utopia had an objective to help us develop many life skills like being organised, leadership, effective communication, collaboration, problem solving, being creative, inquisitive and being resilient. We needed these to effectively work together and be efficient. We worked on Project Utopia during terms 2 and 3 but only knew everything we were working towards by the end of Term 2.
The Giver
During the beginning of Term 2 in English we read the Giver. The Giver is a book about a society that tried to be a utopian society but ended up as a dystopian society with no freedom or choice. This taught us that freedom and choice are extremely important and you can never take them away and you should never take them for granted because some people don’t have the freedom or choice that we have always taken for granted.
Liveability Factors
After we read the Giver in English, we started to learn about liveability factors in Humanities. Liveability factors are about how good a place is to live. It has two parts, spiritual and physical. The physical factors are: Climate; Safety and Stability; Environment Quality; Infrastructure and Access to Healthcare and Education. The spiritual factors are: Personal likes and dislikes; feeling of connection to friends and family and Traditions and spiritual connections. I learnt you need both physical and spiritual factors for the place to be truly liveable. We each chose three different paragraphs of the liveabilty factors to talk about and one feature for each factor. We had to cover Community which was the spiritual side of things, Environmental Quality which was about the physical environment, and we got to choose something that was our own free choice. I chose safety and Iris scanning as a security feature for my third paragraph. I used a night-time market for Community and I used bikes instead of cars for good Environmental Quality. This was then integrated into Project Utopia by us adding all the features in the three paragraphs into our group work.
Sustainability
We learnt about sustainability as a part of Earth systems in Science. We learnt about resources and how they are limited and we also learnt about renewable resources. My group then created a sustainable house that had 35 features that were sustainable. We created a model and a power point to present this to the class.
After we did these things near the end of Term 2 we were told that we were going to do Project Utopia and we then chose our groups. In Term 3 we started building our communities in Innovate [ED] and started to look at constitutions in Humanities.
The UN Global Goals
We also learnt about the UN Global Goals during Innovate [ED] and their aim to create a safe and sustainable world by 2030. These goals helped me learn about what a Utopian Society needs such as stopping poverty, environmental destruction, and inequality.
Constitution
Our constitution for Project Utopia included many things such as the preamble, rules and responsibilities, what action can be taken if members don’t follow the rules and calling a referendum.
We then created our 3D Project Utopia model in Innovate [ED] and prepared our speech for the parent presentation during English. Each group member prepared a one minute speech on one feature as well as having an overview of the whole project. I chose the iris scanning security feature for my speech, my other 2 group members chose the sustainable gardens and our sustainable hydroelectric power plant.
Then we presented our speech using our model and other visual displays to help convey our key messages and what we learnt to our audience. We also had our constitution on display. During the presentation we were asked questions and we were assessed on how well we answered them, how confident we were and how well we listened to the question. We would not say the presentation every time someone new came we would instead ask whether they would like the presentation or whether they would like to ask any questions. We were reasonably well prepared and confident because we practiced as a group asking and answering what we thought would be the most commonly asked questions.
Conclusion
I learnt a lot from Project Utopia including freedom, choice, liveability, sustainability, constitutions and the global goals.
