In Project Utopia, we spent 2 terms doing many different lessons and working on smaller projects to put together the final Project Utopia. We did this in many subjects including English, Humanities, Science and Innovat[Ed]. We also learnt about the UN Global Goals and achieved 10 accreditations for them.
English
We started off in English reading “The Giver”, it was about a dystopian community. This is when we started learning about what a utopia is and started researching. We also saw many inspirations while researching. I was very inquisitive during this, as I had never learnt about utopia and helping to build a community to help the world to be a better place.
Humanities
We learnt about liveability in Humanities. While learning liveability we did lots of group work to communicate. A task we did was being in a group to research about the geographical concepts. In this task, we had to communicate a lot because everyone had to talk to each other about the concepts they researched about. If we did not communicate everyone in the group would not be able to learn properly and would not be able to use the information they need in their utopia.
Science
While learning about liveability we also started learning about sustainability in Science. In this lesson we had to build a sustainable house in a group so this helped build my leadership as I was in a group whom I have never talked to. I was not very sure what to do at first but then I realised that I could take leadership and everyone can have a role to do so that one person does not have to all the work.
Progress
It came to the time they told us about Project Utopia. During the time of working with our groups we had to use some of our core capabilities. These include:
- creativity
- organising
- collaboration
- problem-solving
With creativity we had all done individual brainstorms trying to think of unique features, I had never been very creative but I was proud of what I did in my brainstorm. We also needed to make our station in the expedition to look unique so everyone would be interested, we designed a few visual aids like a flag, article of right and a special booklet that was about our accreditation.
Being organised is a skill I had to use more as it was very busy and if I wasn’t organised things could’ve gotten hectic, I am usually an organised person but in this project I developed some new ways I can be more organised by having a timetable, organising my notes in different sections and using my diary more often.
Collaborating was a very big skill that we needed to have as the project would not have worked, usually I like doing my work independently so this was kind of a challenge to collaborate with my group, during the project and using collaborative skills I learnt to find different ideas and including everyone’s, work together to finish different things like accreditations and also helping each other.
We also had to problem solve when we were designing our model. We had accidentally bought the wrong material so it would not stick on our model and would ruin it, so we were struggling a lot as we could not find any of the actual plasticine. It took up our building time as we had to do that before doing anything else. Then as a group we tried different ideas to fix it like mixing white plasticine with the playdoh and finding blue and plasticine to mix it with the yellow plasticine. We finally worked it out and had to quickly start working on it. This is also when we had to collaborate.
Public Speaking
We also learnt public speaking skills before the showcase, I always thought that I am not confident enough and I can’t do public speaking but after a few lessons I built up my confidence and had positive thoughts about it. This helped me be able to be confident talking to parents and answering more questions.
Important Guests
During Project Utopia every week new guests would come in and help give us ideas for our utopia. In my group, 2 guests came and talked to us and 1 guest accredited us for Goal 4 (Quality Education). These guests include:
- Brad Pettit
- Liza Harvey
- Professor Tanya Fitzgerald
Brad Pettitt, The Mayor of Fremantle
During the process of building, he came and talked to us about our design. He questioned us about why we have decided to do small community hubs within the larger community as no other group had designed it that way, he was interested in how we thought about the citizen’s mental health by using the natural environment.
Liza Harvey, MLC, Leader of Opposition
Liza Harvey came and talked to us at the beginning of the project when we were doing connections between some global goals and types of resources. She helped us in finding creative ways to represent the connections. She also asked us about why we connected a few of our connections.
Professor Tanya Fitzgerald, Professor of Higher Education and Dean of the Graduate School of Education.
Tanya Fitzgerald accredited us on Goal 4 (Quality Education). We were getting accredited by Ms Strenz but she thought that we had great ideas so she called Tanya to come and listen to our ideas. She liked how we connected this goal to other goals and our examples. She also told us a story about how a girl got shot because she wanted to go to school.
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This project has taught me so much and has also helped me as a person. At first, I thought that I wouldn’t be able to do this but after learning everything and building our core capabilities we were able to finish and. I have built my leadership, communication, collaboration, creativity, inquisitive, organisation and my confidence. This is really helpful for my future projects as I can take these skills on and use them.