PLP Winter Exhibition 2019, the biggest project so far this year. Oh yeah, because there was a new Star Wars movie releasing this year, our exhibition was centred around Star Wars. Because of this, our project had two parts, Humanities where we had to write a chapter of a short story about a character, and Maker where we had to make a item that corresponds, and represents our part of the short story.

The very first thing that we had to do for this project was to chose one of the four planets that we wanted to represent at the exhibition. My group, consisted of Holly, Noah, Thomas, Grace, Owen, Matthew and myself. We chose the planet Tatooine, as we all had several ideas for how we could represent the planet at the exhibition.

The first assignment, or milestone that we were given for this project was to write a paragraph on our opinion on one of the Star Wars movies, books, games, graphic novels, and pretty much any thing else that is a form of Star Wars media, which would be submitted to the New York Times’s Star Wars review contest. I decided to review the fourth episode of the new Star Wars show, The Mandalorian. I felt that my review covered all that I wanted to say, but looking back I think I could’ve gone more into depth with my review. We also had to post this to our blogs for the fourth milestone, link is here.

At this point we had been learning about The Hero’s Journey and reading short stories for the past few weeks and we learned about the different writing styles, including perspective, point of view and theme. We also learned about different components of a story.  This helped me write my part of my story, I have never been a confident writer because I had never learned about different techniques and styles of writing. We then had to decide on what character we would focus our story on. Our group chose a character from the Podrace in the first movie, Phantom Menace, his name was Teemto Pagalies.  We then each had to chose a different part of the story to write about. I chose to write about part 3 of the story, Friends, Enemies and Allies, in which Teemto builds a podracer.

I took a different approach than most people did because I wrote the story as if it was in the form of a journal, written by Teemto. I found it to be more enjoyable than any other writing style I have used previously, and I am proud of what I wrote. It was an interesting experience to imagine what he was thinking and feeling and then to write about it.  We then had to read our first draft of our story to our group and get feedback on it. The feedback helped me make small changes to improve my story.

The next part of the project was to create something that represented our story. I really wanted to build a podracer, and someone in my group eventually said something along the lines of  “yes Finn, you can build a podracer” after about the 17th time I had mentioned it. The building of the podracer was a bit more strenuous than I had originally expected and it involved several late nights leading up to the exhibition. I found I had to scale down the size of the podracer because of limited resources, and because I am a detailed oriented person I had to remind myself that the details weren’t the most important part of this project. I was pleased with the end result of my project because I was able to incorporate my ipad into the design and I did a good job replicating the original model. As we were building our blue sky project we had to follow the LAUNCH cycle and record it in the app: Explain Everything.

Before the exhibition we had to do a lot of planning because the space was less than optimal as we had been given a part of a hallway to display our projects. In my opinion our display was one of the best. We had to plan extensively because we had a limited amount of time to set up, and a constricted space to work with. At the exhibition it was fun to see how our projects all came together to tell the story. I had some good feedback on the podracer from people who came to the exhibition.

I really enjoyed my Exhibition group. I found them easy to work with, they were willing to listen to each other’s ideas and we worked well together.

-Finn