The Star Wars unit this year was, well, awesome and it was capped off by going to see an amazing movie. Wait a second, a Star Wars unit? In school? This just proves that PLP isn’t any ordinary program. Let me walk you through my experience of the Star Wars project.
Now, you might have thought that all we’d be doing is learning about the Star Wars universe and watching the famous movies. You were (slightly) wrong. We had to come up with a unique inquiry question about the Star Wars universe and then use extensive research to answer it. To make it clear, we had to think of our own question to answer and we were not given a question from a teacher to research. I found this way of doing a project very interesting and fun in the sense where there wasn’t a lot of guidelines or boundaries. Because of this, each person’s project was unique in its own way.
The first thing we had to do is come up with an inquiry question. My question was: “what effects does carbon freezing play in Star Wars and could it be done in real life?” This question was approved and so I began researching about this topic.
Let me explain my thinking behind my question briefly. In the fifth movie, Han Solo is frozen in carbonite by Darth Vader and taken to Jabba the hut’s palace for not paying him back. He is later rescued and survives with little to no lasting effects. This got me wondering whether it could possibly be done in real life.
My research immediately told me that it wasn’t possible but it also led me to something called cryonics. Cryonics is freezing a person that is recently died in liquid nitrogen, which preserves the body in the hope that medicine will evolve enough over time where they can unfreeze the body and use the medicine to help it live for a short period of time again.
As of right now, no one has ever been revived and the technology is a long ways away from actually allowing this from happening, but you never know what could happen in the future one day.
I could go on and on and on about this subject, mostly because I decide to do a posterboard on cryonics.
Another very interesting aspect about this project is that we had to make something that would somewhat represent your project. For mine, I chose to make a paper mache mask to mimic how Han Solo might have felt going into carbonite. I made a time lapse showing the making of it.
Watch my time lapse Here
Huge thanks to my mom on that one…
The third point of criteria is that we had to interview an expert in the field. Although I was not able to interview an expert on cryonics, I interviewed biologist and professor at SFU Dr. Jonathan Moore. He said some very insightful things about the subject. One quote that really stuck out to me was this: “We are closer to cloning people with their DNA then to people being revived from the dead happening legitimately.” I thought it was interesting in the sense that we have co,e further with cloning that cryonics.
All of everyone’s efforts on their projects culminated into one big night: the winter exhibition (gasp). This was the night that everyone presented our projects to the public. For this night, we were split into two groups to present our projects: the dark side. I was grouped in the dark side. Our task was to completely transform the library into something amazing. This took an incredibly long time, but in the end, it was worth it.
For the entire setup and presentation of our projects, it took about 10 hours total. By the end of it, I think everyone was completely exhausted for being at the school for 12 hours that day.
Here was my (tiring) schedule for that day:
8:00 – arrive at school
8:30-11:15- library setup
11:30-3:00- other classes
3:00-5:00- more setup
5:00-7:00- present our projects
7:00-7:45- cleanup
It was a tough day.
For the dark side, we were also split into 4 subgroups and we gave each group its own space inside the library. My group was “impact on today’s world”
To make it more cool, there was red lighting and even a “cantina bar”, where refreshments such as “vaderade” was being served.
After all the setup, it was time for the public to start coming in. I had never seen or done anything like it before. It was so cool because the experience of it all was very neat. At my station, I had to explain my project to about 50 different people. It was very interesting because each person had a different amount of knowledge about Star Wars and my topic. For example, a few people weren’t able to recall the scene where Han Solo is frozen. I thought that was crazy because it is one of the most well known scenes in Star Wars. On the other end of the spectrum were the experts. Every sentence in my presentation I said they would already know. It was all about being able to adapt to the challenge that each person gives. For this reason, I didn’t give myself a certain script to read every time.
I learned some key knowledge about exhibitions, including making your project eye catching and easy to read, instead of making it long and semi boring. I also now know that exhibitions take a lot of work!
After the exhibition, we were rewarded with an awesome consolation. The entire PLP squad went and watched the brand new Star Wars movie, which was amazing. I won’t give any spoilers out, but it was so cool.
To conclude, the Star Wars unit was a long and interesting project which ended with a bang. I’m excited for it next year!
See you next time,
Nik
danielw
January 8, 2018 — 7:49 pm
First of, great job, you have a very strong blog post with lots of information and content to back up your inquiry. I really like how you described your question and then gave very specific examples from the movie.
To make things more aesthetically pleasing, I suggest you make the images in between your text “full size”. You can do this by clicking on the image and simply changing the size. Also, instead of linking your YouTube video, you should copy the link, and then go to “Add Media” and paste in the URL in the “Insert URL” tab. This will make the video embedded in to your blog which looks really nice and makes things easier for the viewer.