In term 3 all of the year sevens were assigned the task of making a utopia in Fremantle port. Fremantle Port is currently identified by the people as an industrial port. We want to give it a new meaning as a place of recreation and fun, by creating a sustainable waterpark with environmentally sensitive infrastructure. A utopia is a place/ society where everything is perfect and there are no flaws in the community, place, and people. This project sounded easy to do at the start but by the end it was very difficult, and we almost didn’t have time to finish. The project was mainly done in innovate ed, but it was also included in Hass by learning about the liveability factors and working on our vison boards later in the term, and in English we read the book Giver and learnt about utopias and dystopias and what they are/mean. For the project we had to pick some global goals that we wanted our utopia to focus on and be made to solve. My group chose to do any global goals that was linked to sustainability and helping the environment. To finish this project successfully we had to use a lot of collaboration, communication, and organisation.
The UN climate actions that we focused on were climate action, sustainable cities (by reusing the shipping containers to make the cafes and houses), industry innovation and infustructure (the waste powered train, electric bikes, and the recycled plastic that we used to build the water slides in the park) and affordable and clean energy. We assisted in the climate action plan by the sustainable ways of emission in our park, such as replacing traditional polluting ways of transport with electric bikes to get around the park. Our sea water filtration system also helps this goal as it allows us to reuse in many ways e.g., drinking and filling the pools. Along with the climate action plan is affordable and clean energy, as we use three sustainable ways to power our water park, solar, wind and hydro power.
Public speaking skills: This was something that really challenged me. I learnt that I am not a confident public speaker. In the future I would like to develop some strategies to help me with speaking publicly as I know this is a skill I will need to develop. When we were presenting to parents, I was very anxious to begin with, but the more parents that came to our display, the more practice I had at answering questions and I got more confident with speaking to them.
Collaboration: I felt I collaborated well on the vision board as I was responsible for printing and cutting out the photos and helping arrange them. This meant that despite missing many lessons, I was able to get a very good understanding in what other people had been researching whilst I was out from class. This helped me collaborate more effectively with my group as they explained their choice of pictures to me, and I was able to ask questions about what I didn’t understand, and this helped me present more effectively on the parent open day. At the beginning, we all had different ideas and so collaborating was difficult. By talking to key speakers, we were able to narrow our choices and decided as a group to pursue the water park idea. As the project went on, our collaboration got better, we were able to split the parts up and finish the work independently and then collaborate at the end when we brought all our individual research together into our waterpark project.
Communication: As I missed many lessons my group had to use alternative ways of communicating rather than relying on our face-to-face lessons. We used teams to communicate as a group about who was doing what and how I was able to contribute from home, so that we were still able to have a project to present at the end.
Organisation: In the beginning we found it hard to organise ourselves and so elected one person as a leader. He gave us what to research and mine was infrastructure and transport and producing the pictures for the vision board. Personally, I struggled to organise my time at home, leaving many tasks to the last minute. This caused frustration with the rest of my group. I was able to overcome this by breaking the task down into smaller parts. In future, I want to manage my time better by making myself a timetable and sticking to it.
In conclusion I found the project Utopia task extremely helpful because it gave me a deeper understanding of sustainability, liveability and the global goals. This project also made me learn things about myself like how I am not a confident public speaker but that I am a good leader and can finish a large amounts of work in a short amount of time. The ideas we had all linked to sustainability, and if our waterpark was built, would add life to an otherwise dead and industrial land.
The pictures below show (in order) our guest speaker, Lockwood, explaining what the plan was for the Freemantle Port, next, my group walking around Fremantle Port and coming up with ideas on what to develop it into. Next is our group getting feedback on our ideas from a representative from the Board of Fremantle Port. Finally is me and Jinning, in the first week, brainstorming and collaborating on ideas for developing Fremantle Port.
