“The Giver” a book written by Lois Lowry introduced us to the topic of a utopia. A utopia is a society that is perfect and has no flaws, no poverty and everyone is equal. After reading The Giver, I realised that their community wasn’t a utopia and nowhere is. This led us to our Project Utopia for 2021.
Our Project Utopia was different from previous years, in that we had the opportunity to re-design the Fremantle port due to all the shipments moving to Kwinana port. This gave us the opportunity to change the Fremantle port for all potential residents to live and thrive in the area, where previously people haven’t lived. We considered liveability factors, which affect where people want to live and why they want to live there. Transport was the factor we focused on, this is because we wanted the Fremantle port to be a car-free zone, making the air more breathable and liveable.
Our Ideas
My group decided to focus on sustainable transport. Though that is not to say there weren’t any complications during the project. One of our group members wasn’t cooperating very well, they wanted to focus on green space while the rest of the group wanted to do transportation. Eventually, after some teacher help, we managed to get them to focus on transportation with the rest of the group. Through this process, I learned the importance of effective communication and collaboration is to complete a group task and refined problem-solving skills.
The UN global gave us guidelines for the project. These sustainable development goals are important because they give guidelines for how we can live a more sustainable lifestyle on the one planet that we have. The ones that we focused on mostly are Sustainable energy, life on land and sustainable cities and communities. These all link to our sustainable transportation ideas in the aspect of how to power the transport in an environmentally friendly way.
UN Global Goals
Collage Capabilities
At All Saints College (ASC), we also have our College Capabilities wheel. This consists of how we can operate as a team effectively. Some of these include Creativity, Communication, Cooperation, Ethicality, Self-Awareness, Leadership, etc. The main capabilities I used in this project were Creativity, Cooperation, Communication and Leadership. We did this by coming up with new and innovative solutions (Creativity), having to work in a team (Cooperation), communicating in that team (Communication), staying on task and helping others to do what they had to do (Leadership) and generic problem-solving skills.
What Happened
Also, at ASC we have a Design Thinking Prosses. This process gives us the basis for all projects that we do. It starts off with empathising which means we think about people who might need what we are making or creating. The design phase is where we start to describe what we are doing in the project. Followed by the Ideate phase when we come up with ideas for the project. This leads to prototyping when we use our ideas to make a prototype of our top ideas. I learnt the importance of planning before projects or anything with lots of steps, so we don’t get confused with whatever else you have to do in a project.
We had a few ideas for our transport: Ferries (due to there being a large river-like area separating Fremantle from the port), Electric scooters for hire and originally wind-powered buses, but they didn’t work so we went with hydrogen buses instead. The scooters could be dropped off anywhere in the port area but will deactivate when leaving the port area.
For this project, we had to make a vision board to present our ideas to some important people like Chandra Sundareswaran, Jason Pitman, who were experts who visited to support us for this project. But before making our final product we had to plan our future vision board, this had two parts. Fremantle port excursion, we listed things we noticed from each location we went to.
Plan of the Vision Board 
Final Vision Board
Presentation Day
This continues until presentation day. Where we all gather in one building to present to parents, the work that we put our hardest into. This made us work on our presentation skills. These were eye contact, confident tone of voice, knowing what we were talking about, etc.
At the end of the term, our ideas were submitted to the city of Fremantle, for them to consider what we had made to change the Fremantle port for the better, to make it a sustainable and safe place for people of all ages to live and thrive. This project was a bit stressful at times with obstacles thrown into the mix, but we saw it through to the end with a goal in mind.