Fremantle Utopia Reflection
What Is Project Utopia?
Project Utopia started at the beginning of Term 2 and lasted two terms. They interestingly introduced the Fremantle Project by bringing people from the Fremantle Port committee who knew a lot about the situation. The lecture inspired me to make ideas that would improve and enhance what Fremantle already looks like today. We used a good amount of time in both Humanities and English to enhance different elements of this Project.
The Giver
The Giver was a major part of our Project and gave us an overview of what the Project would be about. The book scenes a “Perfect World” until a boy named Jonas, finds some defects within such a place. This gave us our base and a vision of what a Perfect World will look like. The Giver was first introduced in English which shows that this Project crossed over multiple subjects.
Global Goals
Global Goals were an essential part of our project and trying to incorporate them within it, was extremely hard. We needed to look at the Project from all types of perspectives to know for sure, that it fits into the Global Goals. We wanted to add the Global Goals to our Project because it would significantly help our World live in peace and happiness. We think that using the Global Goals will make Fremantle Port an idea of a “Perfect World”
Liveability Factors
In HASS, we used livability factors to give us a base for what the “Future of Fremantle” would look like. This includes:
Objective Factors (Measurable)
- Climate
- Environmental Quality
- Infrastructure
- Safety and Stability
- Access to Health Care and Education
Subjective Factors (Personal and Emotional)
- Personal Likes and Dislikes
- Feeling of Connection to Family and Friends
- Traditions and Spiritual Connections
After understanding what we needed to work with, it made it easier to understand what we needed Fremantle to be like.
Trip to Fremantle!!!
Term 2, Week 2. Our Year 7 Cohort had the amazing opportunity to witness the HUGE Fremantle Port. To get a picture of what we were working with, this seriously helped us understand the scale. Fremantle is a huge place and just placing green spaces everywhere wouldn’t do us much good. Since Fremantle Port was enormous, it was really hard to even think about what more we needed to add! Overall, this was an amazing experience and a great time to learn as well as have fun.
Vision Boards
“One picture is worth a thousand words”
Albert Einstein
This was the first step of the “Future of Fremantle”. On grandparents day, we planned to showcase Vision Boards to give our Grandparents an idea of our project. Since making a long book, would make it hard to understand for Grandparents, we made a big picture to make it more visible as well as more understandable. In this project, we had to focus on specific Liveability factors and research them. In groups of 3-4, each person had to focus on one livability factor, and research and obtain pictures to contribute to our Vision Board. After obtaining all our pictures, Mini used her time at home to print, cut and paste all the photos to make the Vision Board. At school, Mini and I focused on the decorative aspects to bring in people to come curiously to learn more about our Vision Board. In the end, it was a huge success thanks to all the work we had put in. After learning from this, we had to make a huge essay explaining what the photos meant, and what livability factors we focused on. Group: Ananya Basu, Mini Li, Madhav Haribaskar.
Part Planning
Before our showcase, we needed to plan what would go on in each part of the puzzle. We took multiple ideas from different vision boards and took the best ideas off the list. After that, we incorporated our livability factors, to help place where each building would go. Then, the class was able to be split into groups of 3 – 4 and chose a piece of the puzzle.
Making The Piece
My group consisted of 3 members: Madhav Haribaskar, Ileri Mejiuni & Chester Wei. All three of us were determined to do our best in all aspects. This includes Research, Physical Model Work, Co space etc. All of us pitched in to make the model and spend time at home working on the co-space. At school, I drew out the plan for our piece. This process took time since we needed to find the scale. After drawing out our base plan onto our piece, Ileri, cut out blue pieces of paper which symbolized water and stuck them onto our plan. We used different coloured powders, which symbolized roads and green spaces. While we were doing this, Chester was spending time on the Co Space and making the finishing touches to make it look clean and professional.
Speech
In English, Miss Shaw helped us make a speech that would help parents understand our piece. Initially, everyone in our group had to split our piece into three parts so that we would all have something different to talk about.
- Madhav Haribaskar: Super Yachts
- Ileri Mejiuni: Food Options
- Chester Wei: Exclusive Hotel
After knowing what our speech would be about, we started writing. We took multiple attempts to go to Miss Shaw for feedback and tweaked our speech slightly till it was perfect. After perfecting our speech, we started the hardest portion of a speech – Memorising. It took a long time to Memorise the speech and I didn’t have time to make Palm Cards. But after it was all done, we had to show our speech to the class. Our speech was hilarious because Chester forgot 1/2 of his speech and couldn’t remember what he was going to say. After this incident, we made sure Chester used time at home to memorise his speech better and helped him move towards his goal.
Final Showcase
On the final showcase, all of us were fully prepared. We made the visual aspects priority so that it will attract parents to see the showcase. Our first lot of visitors didn’t ask many questions and they left quickly. But after we got more confident more questions were shot at us. Some were hard to answer but some were relatively easy. Overall, Project Utopia was a great experience and let me learn multiple different skills.
