I Never Thought Star Wars Would Be A School Project

2019 has come and gone and with it the last project of the decade. As you probably know the latest Star Wars movie has come out. The third of the latest trilogy, Rise of the Skywalker has put my teachers, and frankly, my entire class on the buzz about Star Wars. So it was only fitting for out last project of the decade to be about Star Wars.

Our driving question for this project was “How might we build an interactive exhibit that explains the hero’s journey?” So obviously the first thing we had to do was learn about what exactly the hero’s journey is. I’ll give you a brief description and include some photos and diagrams that help explain it. The hero’s journey is a basic “plot line” of a story. It has 3 main parts. Departure, fulfillment, and return. The main character of the story will go through these three parts. The departure has 4 main parts. In the departure, our protagonist is called to action. This may be a call to adventure, a call for help, or any other reason our character may leave the world they live in now. At first our character refuses to go, wanting to stay home and not change. But of course, if they didn’t go we wouldn’t have a story. As they warm up to the idea of leaving on this journey, the meet a mentor who prepares the, for the journey ahead. Our character has now crossed the threshold into the unknown world, and coincidentally, the second part of the hero’s journey. This world is the place our character is exploring. They will face challenges, meet allies and enemies, and ultimately grow as a character. It is in this part where they face the SUPREME ORDEAL. Yeah I know it sounds important, and it is. This is what the story has been building up to. This is where our character faces that big boss, realizes what has been causing them so much pain, or why they are there in the first place. Now that our hero has completed their quest, they return home. This is the final part. Our character returns home with newly gained resources, treasure, and/or knowledge that they couldn’t have gotten without venturing into the unknown. They return to their previous life with his newly gained knowledge and scars from their journey.

My final stormtrooper helmet

Well you may be thinking, how does the hero’s journey relate to this project? Well, we were put into groups and made our own hero’s journey. Not immediately of course, we had a lot of stepping stones that helped us understand the hero’s journey a lot better. A really good example that helped me was all the short stories we read in class. These stories gave me good examples of the hero’s journey, as well as giving me new terms about stories that I could use to understand and help myself write my story. We made a chart to record these different story terms and how they were shown in the story. 

Now that we had a good understanding of the hero’s journey, we could finally begin making ours. My group, Ryan, Ally, Kaia, Liam, Rhiann, and Asha, started by making an outline of our hero’s journey. Our story had to be a story that could fit into the timeline of Star Wars. Our “planet” was Endor, so our character is Nicki the Ewok. You will find out more about the role our plants play later. Nicki has one big part in the Star Wars original trilogy. She does a cartwheel! Of course, we couldn’t just sit and let Nicki’s talent go to waste so we made another story on why she was so happy and did this cartwheel after the Battle Of Endor. After we created our outline, we split up our hero’s journey into 7 parts, each to fit a member in the group. The part I got was the SUPREME ORDEAL so I would be writing the story for that particular part. At the end we would combine our stories into one mega story. 

It’s just past noon and Nicki can feel the adrenaline coursing through her body. Her plan to distract the stormtroopers at the launch pad has begun to form. After the altercation with the other stormtrooper, she cant wait to fight the others at the launch. She does have her fears, but she is so happy to be finally doing something other than pottery that she ignores the weird feeling in her stomach. “Finally!” Nicki says out loud,”finally I can do something that can help the Rebels!” If she can successfully complete her mission, then it will be much easier for the Rebellion to control the shield generator on Endor. As she walks along the last hundred meters to the launch she begins to pick up rocks to throw at the stormtroopers. Suddenly, through a clearing in the trees, Nicki sees the massive, silver launch. She sees four white helmets, her target. Once in range, Nicki cocks her arm back and launches the first stone. It struck the first stormtrooper, denting his helmet as he collapsed to the floor. His comrades spot Nicki and begin the chase after her. Nicki leaps back into the forest with lasers burning the trees around her. As she leaps over a log, a laser goes right through her designer hat and Nicki can smell the strands of burnt hair. She ducks under a low branch when suddenly the ground around her erupts with a bang. The force of the explosion sends Nicki flying into a tree stump. Whimpering, she crawls underneath a hole. Images run through her mind. What will they do if they catch her, what Wicket will think when she doesn’t return, how she will die. Stunned, Nicki realizes what she is thinking about. She is going to die. Her stomach suddenly feels like jelly, and her legs are shaking so much she cant focus. Tears form in her eyes as she realizes what she has gotten herself into. Flashbacks fill her mind of that dreaded night. Her mother, abandoned, alone, struck down surrounded by enemies. For one moment, Nicki’s eyes locked with her mothers before the life in her eyes disappeared. Nicki can remember the horror in her heart like it was yesterday. Well, like mother like daughter, Nicki thinks. She closes her eyes, ready to be found by the stormtroopers when an all familiar smell engulfs her. The beautiful smell, so comforting. A smell Nicki hasn’t smelled since she was a child. The sweet smell of her mother. Nicki can feel her presence in the hole as a breeze speaks in her ear. “My journey is over, but yours has just begun.” As she is engulfed by her mothers scent those words hit her. She isn’t dead yet. Encouraged by her mothers presence and this newfound courage, Nicki leaps from the hole, ready to destroy her opponents. Fighting tooth and nail, Nicki leaps onto the nearest stormtrooper and manages to dig the tip of her spear through the white, plastoid shell protecting her opponent. Leaping off of the now dead stormtrooper, Nicki grabs his blaster and scores a direct hit to the remaining two stormtroopers, knocking them back onto the mossy ground. She towers over the stunned soldiers as she finishes them off with her spear. Nicki, full to the brim with excitement and adrenaline, leaps over a log and dances around, ecstatic with her victory. She has never felt so proud of herself. ‘So this is what true adventure feels like’ Nicki thinks, as she begins the long walk home.

I really enjoyed writing the story. I really enjoy writing since I have grown up reading books like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, which also use the hero’s journey😱. I really like writing because it is an outlet to all of the weird ideas and scenarios that pop up in my head. I am always thinking of different worlds or stories and writing is a way for me to translate those stories to something real. I did many drafts of my story and I think the main problem for my story was the flow. Since we had a 500 word constraint I found it hard to fit every idea into it so I was struggling to transition from scene to scene easily. I think I did fix this in the end but it was a big problem for me that I noticed more than once. Other than that though I think my story was pretty good. It could have had a little better introduction but that could be a focus for the next story I write. It was a good learning experience and I enjoyed learning about how some of the stories I grew up with were structured when the author was writing them.

Well that’s it for my humanities portion of this project. Thank you for re-… wait a minute! That’s just humanities! It’s maker time now! Let’s go back to the driving question again. How might we build an interactive exhibit that explain the hero’s journey? Well we have talked about the hero’s journey, so now it’s time to talk about the other half of this driving question. So you already know that we are in groups of 7. This is the same group that we wrote the story with. Well we were assigned a planet. Our planet was Endor, which was why our character was an Ewok. But this was also a big part of the maker portion of our project. We were going to make an object, digital or physical, that represented a part in our story or the story itself.

https://youtu.be/mV1fyZ2qKd8

To help us come up with an idea and make the product we used the LAUNCH cycle. We have used this cycle before, and the project I remember using it most was the Blue Sky Project last year. Anyways this cycle helped me come up with an idea and build it itself.

 

My HMW Form

  • My final spearhead

Now the last thing in this project was to present this at the exhibition. Since the planet I was on was Endor, our room had to look like Endor. So we had snacks that were related to Endor characters (Ham Solo’s, Ewok Jerky(not made out of ewoks), and different forms of shrubbery to imitate the forestry on the planet. I think exhibition went well. I had made a stromtrooper costume out of cardboard and my group did a good job recreating the forest planet we were situated on. If I could redo this project however, I would start making my prototypes earlier. I found that i didn’t have enough time to revise my project and found myself revising it for a week after the exhibition. But I really enjoyed this project, humanities and maker. I liked making something physical because I haven’t done that in a long time for school. Well this is the real end of my blog post. It was a long post, and for that I apologize, but to be fair this was a very big project. Have a great 2020 and I’ll see you all in the next post!

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