The mini Blue Sky Project

Star Wars


A somewhat long time ago in a galaxy approximately 1 kilometre away, our glorious teacher told us about the next big project we were going to do. A Star Wars themed mini Blue Sky project. She said that it would be huge, great, and a ton of work. I didn’t have much of a clue about what it was going to end up like, but I was ready to learn.

The first work we did within the project was the how might we or HMW form which was how we would figure out what we were going to do. The form wasn’t the best way for me to get an idea and instead of having ideas from the HMW’s, I got ideas by brainstorming driving questions.


Once I had brainstormed a few driving questions I selected one and did the rest of the sheet based on it. That’s what I did for Idea 2 until I realized that idea 3 would be much more realistic and so in the end I decided to go with Idea 3. My driving question for idea 3 was “How come most of the planets in Star Wars have only one biome opposed to Earth which has poles and many different biomes in its regions?” This kind of question looking back at it, isn’t the best kind of driving question to have for a project because it doesn’t have a direct answer and the indirect answer can’t be built on the budget of spare cardboard, paper, glue, and stuff from the trash.

The next thing we did was ask tons of questions which we would have to answer using google. It was an easy task and only took an hour or so to complete.

Whenever I came up with a question I’d write it down on the sheet. If I were just reading a book and my mind wandered off to and idea I’d write it down on the sheet. If I were eating and thinking and I got an idea I’d write it down on the sheet. If I were biking home and I got an idea I’d bike home and write it down on the sheet. In total I got 21 questions and some of them even helped me out a little bit. I learned from that assignment that the best questions come in the worst environments, where it takes you a few minutes before you can write it down.

After that we did the inquiry which was more or less a simple plan for what we wanted to do.

For me that was restating things and saying the obvious. It wasn’t much of a process and in the end I didn’t do it perfectly either. It didn’t teach me much but I think that had I given it more effort I would’ve gotten it better than that.

Around the time when we learned about all of those things we also learned about and used the LAUNCH cycle. In the LAUNCH cycle L = look, listen and learn. A = ask tons of questions. U = understand the problem or process. N = navigate ideas. C = create a prototype. H = highlight and fix and then LAUNCH to the audience.

You can see that the work that we did reflected the LAUNCH cycle and that we were then on the create a prototype phase. So I built a prototype, or at least tried to because half way through I realized I didn’t have all the parts. So instead of making a prototype I drew one, listed all the materials, and fixed what I saw wrong in my original plan. It worked out and the real thing was as good as ever. I didn’t take any pictures of it though, because I had different things on my mind but I can tell you how my presentation would go.

First I’d point at my model planet and say this is a Star Wars grass or forest planet. It might be able to exist if it were rotating around the sun at the same distance all year round, and have the same amount of sunlight on every spot. This means that it couldn’t have an axis which makes the planets have poles which are the cold spots. Or have a really weird axis which is more or less not even an axis. Now there are also planets like Coruscant which are city planets which could be Earth in a few millions of years if we do everything right. It could just be that a city covered the whole world and by dong that covered all the water sources, therefore making there be no more clouds. Because clouds or water vapour makes up 50% of the greenhouse affect we would have to replace that with something and my guess would be that the C02 emitted from people would replace the water. I don’t know how they’d get the oxygen but food and water can be imported. Then the last kinds of planets are planets like Tatooine and Hoth which are ice and desert planets. Hoth could be Earth in the Ice Age or just a planet far away from the sun and Tatooine is a desert planet which resembles a Mad Max wasteland and something from a future where Trump gets re-elected, or people don’t pay attention to climate change. There’s one more kind of planet and that is the tropical planet where the big battle in Rouge One takes place. That could be a planet with a strong greenhouse affect and lot of water on the surface.

 

Reflecting on the project, I could have done it better but I’m contempt with the outcome. I know what to change for the better next time and what to keep. A project from which I learned about doing projects. See you next time, goodbye. 👋

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