FUTURAMA: Reflections on the Past and Perspective of the Future

The Futurama project is an educational program which informs students (mainly high school students) in an interactive form about the Communism period and what it was like to live under a totalitarian regime.

The program is composed of several parts. First the students will watch the inspiring short documentary films from the series Wonderful Years without the Curtain in which their counterparts question young well known Czechs who at the birth of democracy stood on the threshold of adulthood. The students query what it was like to be a student during a time of repression and often make fundamental yet surprising discoveries. The film is followed by a discussion of the controversial moments of the previous regime, clarifying some key milestones and facts about the history of the East Bloc and their impact on present day society. All of that is done in an attractive and comprehensible way for teenagers. The central part of the program is an interactive game in which the students themselves go back twenty years in time and face the decisions their parents may have faced. Every decision has its consequences, some of which can be fatal. How will the students do? How would their life be if they had been born 20 years earlier? The students will experience hands-on what it meant to be a dissident, an accomplice to an undercover agent or an émigré. 

This interactive game is tied to the project Totalitarian Simulator, the planned interactive „hands-on“ exhibition space which will simulate life between 1945 and 1989. The students will have an opportunity to study up-close the detailed model, done to scale, of the Simulator designed in cooperation with renowned Czech artists. The miniature model has captions informing the students about the basic features of life in the East Bloc. 

The program comes with work sheets, a list of key terms and a timeline which can be an interesting variation to educational school activities. Download working sheets here.

The project is funded by the Community action programme „Europe for Citizens“ and is offered to schools free of charge. It has an international character and will take place in high schools in Prague, Berlin, Krakow, Bratislava and Budapest.