Ever since I was a little girl I loved Star Wars. The characters were awesome and I loved the fight between good and evil. So two years ago when I heard my brother would be doing a project involving Star Wars, I got so jealous, especially since he wasn’t really a fan of the movies. This is why I was so happy to find out I would be doing the same thing and I knew I had to push myself.

Inquiry Question

When thinking of an inquiry question I wanted to focus on the characters, as in my opinion they’re the best part of the Franchise. I began thinking about Ewoks, but Jordyn had never seen Star Wars and I knew she’d love them. I then thought about the droids. No Star Wars movie would be the same without C3PO saying some annoying comment, or R2D2’s beeps. While I was thinking the idea creating a female droid, as it does annoy me how none of the Star Wars droids are female. After going through critique my final question was “All droids in Star Wars are portrayed as males, what characteristics could I use to make the first female droid?”

Creating a Personality

Technically droids can’t have a gender as they are a piece of machinery. However droids are given personalities which we connect to a gender. An example of this would be C3PO. We all think of C3PO as a “he” because of his voice, pronouns, and personality. Another interesting concept is that a droid can have multiple personalities with different genders. An example of this is in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when their computer switches from a male personality to a female one. When I was originally planning my droid I was going to make her look femmine by using makeup, hair, or body shape. I soon realized I didn’t want to do that as it enters the area of stereotyping. Instead I made her feminine by using strong female characteristics of a mother in her personality. Another thing I did was name her Mom-Bot to signify her gender.

Research Element

After, we each filled out a pitch form explaining how we would answer the question with our project. I decided to build a droid that could chat with a person somehow. The next stage of the project was all about research. We each had to have one text source, one interview, and one video source. My text source was an article about a pink R2 droid made for a girl with brain cancer. My video source was the tutorial for rebot.me which is the website I used to make the chat interface. However I had no idea what to do for my interview as I didn’t really know what field my project was in. I resolved the problem by interviewing my Mom about good and bad qualities of a mother.

Construction and Programming

The next stage was building Mom-Bot and programming her chat interface. With her chat interface I wrote small talk and came up with multiple answers for each. Once I had a few basic conversation points, I tested it out on my friends. In class I would ask my friends to have a conversation with her. All of their unanswered questions would show up in the knowledge section of the website where I could fill them in. Meanwhile in the evenings I began designing Mom-Bot. The first step was to cut the foam board for her body. I then needed to figure out how to get my iPad into her chest. I decided to cut my old case to hold my iPad in the perfect spot. Once that was finished I used a power drill to cut 40 holes in her for the lights to go in. The last difficult stage was making legs and arms out of vent tubes. With help from my mom I drew circles and cut them with an exacto knife. We put the legs in the holes and frayed sections of the vent tubes to spread it out.

Transforming the Room

Once our projects passed final critique it was time to start thinking about the exhibition setup. This year the grade 8’s and 9’s were split into the light side, which I was on, and the dark side. We started our collaboration in humanities class by splitting into categorized subgroups. We split into philosophy, environment, and tech. I was in the tech group which was the smallest of all three. While brainstorming ideas for a theme someone suggested that the environment section could be outside and the tech and philosophy could be a rebel base. We all agreed that idea was good. When we picked the rebel base we chose the one on Hoth because it would transform the room the most. 

Later we started to discuss audience engagement. The grade 9’s had come up with the idea to do a skit every 15 minutes. We all liked the idea however we thought there should be some improv mixed in as well. However this ended up failing on the night of the exhibition. We also thought of a game called “Pin the lightsaber on the Yoda”. Grace drew the photo and a small group of grade 8’s made the lightsabers. Our next focus was food and drink. Since I had visited a few exhibitions before I thought it would be a good idea to have self serve food. So we made “The Admiral Snack Bar”.

The most stressful part of the process was on Thursday when we actually had to decorate the room. I spent basically all day in the class moving desks, taking down pictures, and making snow.

On the night of the exhibition everything worked out which made it so much fun. However at the end I was extremely tired and my legs ached a ton. I learned so much from this experience. The biggest thing I took from this project was problem solving. An example was when I put the iPad case in diagonal so I twisted it. It also taught me a lot about how much impact a personality has on anything. This project was so much fun and I couldn’t think of a better way to finish first term.

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