A long time ago in a galaxy far away…..

Uhhhhh not really. Last week we had the annual PLP winter exhibition. This years theme for the grade 8s and 9s, was Star Wars! This stressed me out at first, but also excited me. I knew nothing about Star Wars, besides that Darth Vader was Lukes father and Yoda was a green swamp dude who could move things. Growing up with a older brother, Star Wars is a part of me even if I haven’t watched the movies. That doesn’t make sense, but It kind of does.

Anyways, I’m going to breakdown this project by using something called an Inquiry Star.

Connect and wonder:

This was a stage where I struggled. Knowing little about Star Wars, and not having time to watch all the movies, coming up with a question about it is hard. My first idea for a question was “What do the different colors of the lightsabers mean?” As I was expecting, it was declined. Next was “Where is yin and yang found in Star Wars?” Declined. I needed to go deeper. Thankfully, Mr Hughes and Ms Willemse sat me down and helped me out. They liked the idea of the Yin and Yang but they knew (I didn’t) that I wasn’t fully understanding yin and yang, and gave me this exact article to read.

This broadened my view and made me realize, yin and yin isn’t a philosophy Itself, it’s in a philosophy, which is a Chinese called Taoism, that emphasizes living in harmony with the Tao (the way). I didn’t know this existed until that moment, and this is where I start investigating.

 

Investigate:

Ok, being honest I really enjoyed this part of this project. I sat down one day after school and read probably over 30 articles about Taoism, yin and yang and learnt about something called Qi. Not only I did that, I watched many videos that try to attempt to make you understand all the Star Wars movies in 5 minutes.

After watching many of those, and reading many articles, I started understanding how much Taoism and Star Wars are interconnected. After more research, I learnt that George Lucas has admitted to using Taoism as a base to the complex story of Star Wars. I chose to focus on Yin and Yang which is the balance of Star Wars, and Qi which is the Force. The Yin and Yang part is about how both dark and light are equally important, and the struggle back and forth between the two isn’t unrest – it’s balance.

Taoism taught me that seemingly opposite or contrary forces are actually complimentary or interconnected. This all relates to the light and dark sides of Star Wars. So, now that I have my question “How did Taoism inspire Star Wars?” I’m ready to construct!

Construct:

When I first think of poster boards I get bored, so when I realized the most practical way to show all this awesome information I learnt, was with a poster board, I knew I had to make it good. I started off with a black trifold board, and drew little white dots to make it look like the Star Wars logo background.

I then printed off my favorite images of the dark and light side, as well as the most key information I had about Taoism found in Star Wars. I made sure to not let them be huge paragraphs no one will read, and made them short and to the point. I then printed out my question in huge Star Wars font. This helped add to the Star Wars mood. Oh and I can’t forget to mention the big Yin and Yang on the board, I made that out of flimsy poster boards and added green and red lightsabers.

Once everything was formatted, I added some red lights and voila! Ready to present at the exhibition.

Publish:

The large amount of grade eights and nines got split up into the light and dark side, and I got put into the dark side. There’s no reason for that as my project is on both light and dark equally, but I was happy to be on that side. Then from there we split up into groups from our group. We had military, impacts on todays world, behind the scenes, technology and my group, philosophy. This was a awesome group of me, Daniel, Marshall, Adlih, and our grade 8 new friends Jackson and Taylor.

From the beginning I had a vision of the library with the lights off and red lights and stars everywhere around our projects. It ended up being like that, and I loved how it turned out. I would go into depth on the creating of the room, but that would take many hours and much stress flashbacks. The dark side, and light side both ended up amazing and I’m so so so so so so proud of all of us for working so hard.

I had fun explaining a whole philosophy to people in under 2 minutes, and I loved being asked questions. I was proud to stand in the dark side in front of my project, along side some amazing other projects.

Debug: (personal reflection)

I’m hoping Debug means a reflection? I’m going with that because I want to look back on this experience and learn from it, good and bad. Having this new learned knowledge from my 3rd exhibition, will be helpful for the June exhibition. I’m going to take a tip from myself next time, and start earlier than I did for this project. I’m happy with how this all worked out, but I did do it in 5 days. A bit stressful yeah.

Overall, I’m proud of myself, my group, the grade 8s and grade 9s. This in my opinion was the most successful exhibition I’ve been a part of.