In Year 7, Term 3 I took part in Project Utopia. This started with reading Lois Lowry’s ‘The Giver’ and ended with presentation day. In between we learnt about liveability, we made a sustainable house and created our constitution. This project focused us on making a utopian city. Now I will talk about what I learnt from this.
The main thing I learnt from this experience was not learning as such but rather how to face my fear of public speaking. I used to be scared of talking to strangers but now I can talk to people I don’t know with greater confidence. One of the main reasons I’m scared of talking to strangers is that I don’t know them so I’m not sure what they are like but now I can say I would be confident in talking to most strangers or people I don’t know.
Something new I was able to do was be extremely organized alongside my group. I was more efficient, helpful, and consistent with the effort I put in. This was a challenge to me because usually with projects like these I fall behind with time or I forget where I’m up to, but with this project, I was able to stay ahead of schedule. One of the main reasons I was able to do this was because I had a group who supported me all the way through the project. This made me feel more confident because we had a schedule on Teams that we had created which let me know when things were due.
The Humanities part of this assignment were the liveability goals and the Constitution. When we were at learning@home we started to learn about the liveability factors. These are the concepts that determine whether a person likes a place or how people feel about a place. These are split into 2 groups; the Objective factors (physical things) and the Subjective factors (personal likes/dislikes). An example of an Objective factor is climate and an example of a Subjective factor could be a spiritual connection to the land. The constitution was when we were learning about civics and citizenship. In our constitution, it mentions heavily that people are the most important part of our society. We felt this was important because if they have good health and are happy the economy rises because people will have a positive attitude on life.
I learnt how to have effective collaboration while this project took place. We had some difficulties but that is normal for all people and groups. We easily picked what each of us was going to focus on in our speech without any problems and we managed to create our CoSpaces without any issues. Because we collaborated well together we managed to achieve 3 accreditations global goals easily. This was an accomplishment because as far as the teachers, parents and other students told us we did a great job with our presentation.
The UN Global Goals were another important part of this project. As I mentioned before we achieved 3 accreditations. “Good healthcare and wellbeing” meaning everyone has access to free and good healthcare, “Quality education” meaning people can get a good education no matter who they are, and “Responsible consumption and production” meaning there isn’t wastage of resources. These were important to us because in our community we want our citizens to be healthy and happy. You can only have those 2 things if people are well educated. We also don’t like wasting resources and so that is why we got the last accreditation.
When it was the real presentation night lots of people came to our table and even considered that they might live there. Several people tried the VR goggles and many people seemed to enjoy this. I think 3 or 4 people said they would want to live in our city, and I remember 1 person said the reason is that people are the most important thing in the community. I say all in all people enjoyed and liked our city.
I will talk about our City. City Z is located in Queensland, Australia. It is made up of domes, each with its own purpose, for example, commercial, holiday island, agriculture, and even environment. These allow people to be safe from any natural disasters in the area. My city revolves around education and health care which is why we got accredited in those 2 things. In our hospitals, we upgrade the technology annually to the best available so medical staff can perform efficient surgery.
I received a good grade on everything and was very surprised when I saw I received the highest you could get in detail because I’m not one for adjectives. I thought I would get high in eye contact which was great but the best thing I saw was vocal expression because I always try to be polite. The only, not excellent score was for teamwork but to be honest that’s my best so far. In conclusion, I say that Project Utopia overall was a big success. When I look back in hindsight, I realized that the difficult thing for me was to make a perfect society because that is impossible. But for what I did with that in my mind, I say it’s a perfect place to be