I never thought that Star Wars could be apart of school until now and most people probably thought that as well.
Our task for the exhibition was to put together a project to present to an audience on December 14th, every grade 8 and 9 student came up with a strong Star Wars themed inquiry question and were put into either the dark side or the light side based on the theme of their question. We used the inquiry star to connect and wonder, investigate, construct, publish and debug.

The first point of the inquiry star is:

Before we started any of our question brainstorming, Ms. Willems taught us about making a comprehensive question that could be expanded on. We learnt the difference between a yes or no question or one that could start a conversation or be researched.
When we began to start brainstorming it took me quite a while to find the right one because I couldn’t find one that evenly showed real world events and Star Wars events.Most of my ideas were based around the making and filming of Star Wars, at first I was thinking of exploring the filming and camerawork, but that was too broad. So I spent a whole evening sitting at my desk trying to think of something good, while I looked through a Star Wars book.

Then I came across a page all about holograms, this was it! But I couldn’t just do a project about holograms, I needed to connect it to the real world somehow. At first I thought of comparing holograms to the printing press because if it wasn’t created, then we would still be writing letters by hand and telling others information only in person. As far as we know it’s the same with the holograms in Star Wars, if they didn’t have them, they would have to travel to the person to talk to them or send someone to carry a message.
After I showed my question to Ms. Willems she said that I should modernize it more, to make it more relatable to people today. So I finally decided on “Why the holograms in Star Wars are like FaceTime.”

The second point of the inquiry star is:

This phase of the project was pretty straight forward, I did research on both the Star Wars portion and the real life portion. I used both the internet and books from my house to find information.

   

One element of the project was to interview someone who works in a field that relates to your inquiry question, I contacted Lei Wang, he is a master at nuclear science and is working on improving hologram technology but sadly he didn’t reply, so all my information was from research. When I was half way through my research I realized that I couldn’t find as much information on my topic as I had hoped I would, most of what I wanted to talk about during my presentation was my theory about holograms in the future. To support my theory that I had in my mind, I found an article about scientists who are building “Star Wars like” holograms.

The third point of the inquiry star is:

This was the physical part of the project, we needed to build something to go with the information. We were encouraged to not use a basic poster board because its not supposed to look like a science fair project, but 90% of us ended up using them and they ended up looking great. For mine I used a smaller one that propped up against the wall, mine was an old poster board from an old project so I covered it with light blue paper to represent the light side.

I didn’t want my poster board to be cluttered so I decided to put a smaller amount of information on the board along with some smaller pictures around them. I used adobe illustrator to create the title on my board and did a lot of measuring to make the letters the right size so that they would fit on the cardboard board that I cut out.

The fourth point of the inquiry star is:

Now here’s the rundown, the exhibition was divided into two sections, the light side (my group) was in the plp room and the dark side was located in the library.
We had the opportunity to decorate our room however we wanted to, of course sticking to the theme on our side. For our room, we divided the room with two different sheets hanging from the ceiling acting as walls, these sheets separated the three different topics within our side, philosophy, tech and environment.

    

Each topic group decorated their space to go with the topic, my group (technology) had a GIF of the Death Star plans projected on the wall along with cut outs of AT-AT walkers and different ships taped to the window. Even though we organized our selves into separate groups, we all ended up working together on everything.

When I presented to people, I talked about FaceTime showing many similarities to Star Wars holograms, that being that they are both used for the same reasons, communication and business, holoprojectors are much like our phones and TVs. I also explained the article I read about nuclear scientists working on creating “Star Wars like” holograms for the future, and lastly I ended my presentation with saying that because Star Wars is a futuristic movie, it shows that their use of holograms and even other futuristic devices could be our reality in the near future.

For my model to go along with my project, I decided to build a small hologram which ended up being pretty popular during the exhibition. What I did was I cut out four trapezoids shapes from a CD case and taped all four of them together to create a prism shape. Then I used a hologram video, which is basically four different videos that reflect off of the prism and create one “floating” image. When I first tried the hologram, it was hard to see because of the lights and you could only clearly see it when you had the lights out. So I decided to build a case for it, I took a cardboard box then I glued a shoebox inside for the iPad to sit on and I cut a small hole in the front of the box so you could view the hologram. I painted the box purple and drew stars all over it to make it look nicer and lastly I added Velcro to the back of the box so that I could open and close it easily.

The fifth point of the inquiry star is:

Since this was the first exhibition that I’ve been apart of, I have quite a few ideas to make my exhibition experience even more successful next time. The first thing I would’ve done is actually stick to the project timeline that Ms. Willems gave us, I didn’t pay attention to it and I ended up getting pretty behind which just ended up giving me more stress and more homework. The main part that I got behind on was the creation of the inquiry question, I thought that it would be easier to think of one. It wasn’t. Once I had figured out my inquiry question most of my classmates had already finished most of their research so I had to do my research in a shorter amount of time which meant that the nuclear scientist that I contacted wouldn’t have been able to contact me before the exhibition. Next time I will use a bigger poster board so that it is more intriguing to the audience, I will also put even more information and pictures on the board so that there will be more for their audience to look at and it will be easier for me to present because I will have more reminders of what I’m going to talk about and my presentation will end up being longer and more thorough.

One more thing I will do differently with the appearance of my project is I will build two models so that once again my project is more intriguing, my hologram that I built was very popular but from a distance it didn’t look very interesting.
When we were planning how to decorate our room during class it almost seemed like we were doing anything but thinking about decoration, we talked as a group about the skits we were going to do and what was going to be on the snack table but once it came to the time that we had to decorate our room on exhibition day we had to improvise a lot and think of a lot of it on the spot. Our room looked great but I just wish that we would’ve planned it a bit better. For the talking part of my presentation, I wish that I would’ve researched more so that I could talk more. My speech wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t very long and didn’t have very much knowledge behind it, it was also short because I was really nervous the entire time.

Well that was a really long post but there was a lot to say about this exhibition and I’m sure that I covered it all. To end this I want to say that this was a very successful exhibition and I’m so proud of everyone. I hope that future exhibitions will be as successful as this one.