The Force. A power that can be acquired through years and years of hard training. Jedi’s in modern day have been training this power for years with only the most pressing Jedi’s mastering it. Except for me…

 

This year our teachers decided for us to do a miniature blue sky revolving around Star Wars. When I had first heard the idea, I was ecstatic. All the hype building up around the new movie, and now a school project about Star Wars! I came up with my idea for the project while the teacher was still busy explaining it. The idea I had come up with was to create the push force by using a leafblower. My driving question was “how can I create the push force using the limits of today’s technology?”.

Roughly a week after creating that pitch forum, I began to create my “force”. It started with an ordinary leafblower with a cord.

I then removed the black tube that the air travels out from, and assembled all my parts.

A backpack, extension cord, old vacuum tube, and switch were all I needed to create my project. My first step to insert the vacuum tube into the leafblower, and that is where the air will come out of.

The packaging foam was used to keep the tube in place, and to stop access air from escaping. The next step was to attach the leafblower to my backpack with about one and a half rolls of Gorilla Tape.

The switch that can be seen at the bottom left of the picture is how I easily turned on and off the leafblower. The cord attaching to the leafblower was plugged into an extension cord that had a majority of itself tucked into my backpack, and then plugged into my switch. The leafblower itself was set to “ON” the entire time, but only by flicking the switch would it turn on and off. This made it much easier for me to control the settings, and worked amazingly. Here is a short video of how the machine looked on my back before I put a cape on.

The cape that I put on was used to cover up the ugliness of my project. It was also a Darth Vader cape, so that added to the Star Wars feel. This is what it looked like with my cape on.

Finally it was time to test if my creation worked well. The Jedi trained the force using special balls, so I created my own “special” ball to test with.

Once the exhibition came, I thought that my group would be well prepared. I was very wrong. We had to decorate our classroom like the snowy planet of Hoth, but to do so the classroom had to be completely cleaned. Did I also mention that I was in the only group with one grade 10, which was me. The biggest challenge of this whole project was trying to get the grade eights to calm down and decorate the class. The whole room was a complete mess for about 45 minutes, but in the end I think our rooms was one of the best.

In the end, the exhibition went amazing, and I think that I did a good job of presenting my project. A lot of the people were amused by my creation, and some even wanted to try it themselves. I improved on my problem solving skills from this project, for example when adding the switch. Originally I had to reach to the back of the leafblower to turn it on and off, but with the switch it became much easier. On the non-educational side, I learned a lot about the real religion Jedism. The answer to my driving question was, by using a leafblower and lots of power cords. I had a lot of fun in this blue sky, and I look forward to the next one.