Introduction

Project utopia was a humanities assessment which we spread across 3 other school subjects, first, we connected project utopia to English where we had our first glimpse of the project when we read the novel called the Giver by Louis Lowery which was the author’s version of a perfect world. We would soon after try to great our perfect world. Followed by science, where we enhanced our knowledge of sustainability and learned that we can incorporate small things into our everyday lives that will benefit the environment. Thirdly we introduced humanities when learning about the liveability factors to make life desirable for the citizens of our society, geographical concepts and civics and citizenship to help formulate our constitution. Near the end of the project, we incorporated English into project utopia to create our speech for our showcase.

This is our group discussing our plan for the upcoming building stage of project utopia.

ASC Capabilities

I learnt many different life skills throughout this project and will value and use these skills throughout the rest of my time here at all saints as well as I do when I move onwards past school. Most of the skills that I have learnt are from the school ASC capabilities the main capabilities I feel that I have significantly improved on are effective communication, collaborative, problem solving, resilient, and leadership.

UN Global Goals

The key part of the project that tied it to the real world was how we incorporated the UN global goals. The UN global goals are 17 goals constructed by the United Nations to stop real-world problems affecting people every day and try and fix them by 2030. We have incorporated the UN global goals in our society by having accreditations which was a system where we had to create a speech explaining how we would fix that problem in our utopian society and then incorporate it our society. After completing your speech/explanation your facilitator will determine whether you have addressed the problem or not and then if so you would get a slip which you would put in a sleeve to show on the night of the showcase, I found that this system was a very effective way of addressing real-world problems, but I found it took a reasonable time to complete a full in-depth speech addressing what you and your teammates thought about the issue and then having to wait to discuss with a teacher. Overall, my team was able to acquire 3 accreditations including Goal 3 Good health and wellbeing, Goal 4 Quality Education, Goal 12 Responsible consumption and production.

Project Utopia Showcase

Nearing the end of the project we started to prepare for the showcase night before this we had to great our speech which we presented as an English assessment. I think that I did not do as well in the practice of our speech, I felt that I needed to be more confident and to try not to get distracted. To fix this next time I will make sure to be looking at the audience and do a lot more practice as a group. On the showcase night, I fell that I performed a much better performance and I spoke with a lot more confidence and did not get distracted. I also varied my speech every few speeches so that I did not need to look at my palm cards as much and I feel that this was very effective. Another contributing factor to my improved performance I think was that I was performing in front of adults which would not judge me as much as my peers since I do not know them as well. Overall, I think the showcase night was very successful not just for me but for the rest of the year group.

Presenting Our Utopia

As a group, we decided that the best way to display our work for our utopian society was to use cospace. Cospace is an online platform in which you can make a virtual world which can be experienced through your computer screen as well as through VR. My group found that cospace was a much more effective choice to display our utopia because it played to our strengths and allowed us all to work on it at the same time and made it accessible for us all to work on it at home. I feel that at first, our group had a struggle with cospace because we had the habit of building for the sake of building but throughout the process of the project we started to narrow down what we needed to do and started to build with purpose. At the night of the showcase, we let the visitors of our station experience our utopia through the VR goggles which I think enhanced their perspective of our utopia.

Conclusion

After completing project Utopia, I feel that I have personally improved on a lot of skills I would have considered to be more of a struggle for me like public speaking which I think I improved on. On the showcase night. Seeing as we were the first year 7s to do Project Utopia my feedback for the next year 7s I think that the teachers should introduce the building stage earlier on so that groups can finish building earlier and then be able to focus on the speech for the showcase more.