Have you ever watched a Star Wars movie? If so, I can pretty much guarantee you that you have asked at least one question as a result of watching the films. Our maker project this winter was just that. We were tasked with creating an interesting and insightful question about Star Wars, and then answering that question with a cool and fun project. Since I know a lot about Star Wars from my years of reading Star Wars books everyday, I wanted to ask a really nerdy question. So I thought, “what is one thing in the Star Wars universe that is everywhere but goes unnoticed easily”? After some thought, I came up with a good starting question. How do speeders and ships float over the ground? After I got my question approved by our maker teacher Ms. Willemse I started my research.

I first started out on Wookieepedea searching for why speeder’s float. It turns out it is done with a technology called Repulsorlift. It is a knit of fibre underneath the hulls of vehicles that reverses the effect of gravity, It was created by black holes and resulted in the creation of a liquid that, once put underneath a speeder or ship in Star Wars, it will make it float.

Once I had finished gathering information, I needed to put it all together as a project. I decided to use a poster board to display my words and photos. I also used a model of a speeder that looked like it was floating in a clear box, but it really was suspended with a taped fishing line. I used styrofoam to create symbols to represent different sections on my poster board, almost like a sculpture. What I did was cut out a question mark, spray painted it silver and also painted a semi sphere silver to look like the earth. This way I could easily split up the question section from the real world section. On the question section, was the basis of my question. “What is Repulsorlift technology”? On the real world section, I listed ways that Repulsorlift technology would change our world today if it was introduced. I think the biggest change would be that free travel would be available to everyone. This would mean no border security and much higher risk for acts of terror and war. All of my supplies were purchased from Staples, Toys R Us and Michaels.

I also wanted to engage with my audience so I created a game. This was a guessing game where there were 5 pictures of different vehicles in Star Wars and if you guessed which ships had Repulsorlift and which ones didn’t, you could win a prize. The reason why I did this was so I could get my audience more interested in my project and to also gain a bigger audience.

Finally, it was time for the exhibition. The moment of truth, the final stage. I had everything ready, my project felt really strong. I brought everything I needed to bring, and I was prepared. Now all that was left, was to set everything up to make the library as dark and Sith as possible. We brought in red floodlights and other ambient lighting to give the room a spooky feel. For snacks we had “Vader Ade” which was red Gatorade and Powerade, and “Stormtrooper Marshmallows” which were marshmallows with stormtrooper faces drawn on with a food colour marker.

We also made walls with huge sheets of black paper taped to the pillars to create a sort of pathway so that there was a planned direction people should walk through. With all of our visual stuff done it was finally time to present! A small unexpected challenge happened when part way through the night, the fishing line holding my Star Wars ship inside the plexiglass box came undone. This would not have been a big deal except for the fact that the box was locked and the key was nowhere to be found. Definitely a lesson learned for me. I thought I had absolutely everything prepared, but had not considered this one small yet very important detail. In the end, you could still see the Start Wars ship, but it was not hovering as I had originally planned.

Other than this small glitch, the night went amazing. So many nice people were genuinely interested in our presentations. It was a lot of fun, I got to show off my knowledge of Star Wars and I also got to share my knowledge with other people who enjoyed my project! My tactic for engaging my audience worked well in the end as people were really interested in the game. I thought it was interesting that most people did not know which ships had used Repulsorlift technology. I am looking forward to blue sky later this year!