Star-Wars Exhibition 2019

Hello!

Today I will be reflecting on the Winter Exhibition my PLP class participated in; specifically my Blue Sky Project. This year all our questions needed to relate to connections between the vast Star Wars universe and our own. We had to have a driving question for our Blue Sky Project, so I decided I would ask: How might our military benefit if they could use Mandalorian armor? to solve our problem we had to use the LAUNCH cycle. the first thing that I did was the L phase, look listen and learn, in this phase we started out by making a mind map where we would take a look at our ideas and then try to put them into a how might we question. then we could move onto the A phase ask tons of questions, this is where we would ask a lot of questions about our topic and then we could take the questions and develop answers in the U phase. some of my questions were how heavy is real body armor? how heavy is mandalorian armor? can mandalorian armor stop a bullet? etc the answers were quite complicated to figure out so I will give you the short answers mandalorian armor is 46.5 pounds evenly distributed military body armor is anywhere from 1o pounds to 40 pounds plus all the back pack weight and all the other gear weight is another 80 pounds the mandalorian armor is able to stop a bullet if you would like to know more about that then look at the explain everything that is at the bottom of this post

I have always been fascinated with military armour, from the knights to modern day soldiers. Star Wars is know for having fantastic armour from the Stormtroopers to Darth Vader and Mandalorian Armour as worn by characters like Boba Fett. I liked the Mandalorian armour as a kid due to the way it looked really cool. When I got older I started to look into the deeper fictional philosophy and characteristics of deeper Mandalorian culture. As I did my research reading books and articles about the Mandalorians (Everything in the Star Wars Universe has extensive backstory and history) I discovered that it was claimed to be the strongest steel in the galaxy. Once the Star Wars theme was announced exhibition came up I knew I  could combine my fascination with armour with a direct connection to our real world. For my

For our overall class project, I teamed-up with other people from both my grade 8 class and students from the grade 9 PLP class. As we were broken down into smaller teams, each team was tasked with presenting a room resembling a designated planet from Star Wars. My designated planet was Hoth which is the Ice planet you can see in Episode 5 – The Empire Strikes Back. Other planets designed by other teams included: The Death StarTatooine and Endor.

As I mentioned, our group task was to decorate the room so that when guests walked in, it would feel like they are actually visiting that planet. I really believe our team did a fantastic job with this task. One of the key details to recreate an “Ice Planet” experience is of course, that it has to be cold! To create this effect, we filled-up large bowls with ice and then used fans to blow cold air into the room. It was amazing, the room was like walking into a fridge, I couldn’t believe how much colder it was than the hallway just outside. For decorations. we put up white sheets in a configuration that made it look like an ice cave and we had a projector screen  playing the Hoth scenes from the Empire Strikes Back for context and mood. I brought snow flakes made out of wood that we hung from the ceiling and on the walls which spun and sparkled to add to the snowy effect. In terms of the actual presentation space for our individual presentations, we made sure that everybody had enough space to set up their project while also having enough space for people walk around and gather to look at the presentations. As this is PLP, there are always multiple subjects and projects connected together, for the secondary Scimatics component, Three of us had to was make a “Mazer Tag Laser Maze” which we built to resemble an Imperial AT-AT Walker.  If you want to discover more about that project you can check-out my blog post about it http://www.blog44.ca/liame/2019/12/31/mazertag-reflection/ The two people I built the Mazer Tag project with were Erin and Indira.

Curricular Competencies

Innovative Designer:

I showed that I was a Innovative designer when I was trying to figure out how to make my suit of armor, I did this by making prototypes by 3D modeling what the armor would look like on a person of my body size so that i could get the proper measurements so that the armor would look right and be comfortable to wear. In order to do this, I had to take a full-sized set of plans, figure-out what the conversion factors would be to make it smaller and transfer all the measurements to a smaller template. I then took this template, created a paper model for confirmation of size before cutting and molding a cardboard costume.

Computational Thinker:

I demonstrated being a computational thinker by studying different scenes in movies and looking at different sources online and looking through different books to study and come up with solution’s to the question and to see if there was any real world application for Mandalorianarmor would or if it is just something that would be used in the movies because it looked good.

Creative Communicator:

I demonstrated being a creative communicator by communicating with the audience the night of the exhibition and interacting with them answering their questions with full sentences and explaining the process that I went through to come up with the solution to my problem. I expressed my ideas creatively with multiple styles of presentation: I used videos,  showed officialbooks about the props and fictional Mandalorians. I also presented diagrams with detailed comparisons of Mandalorian armor with modern military armor demonstrating the real body armor that the fictional armour was based on. I created a full set of Mandalorian body armorwhich I wore and I brought in an actual functional military plate carrier along with fitted armour plates for guests to personally pick-up and interact with.

For our project we used an app called “Explain Everything” that we were able to track the story for the LAUNCH cycle. Please click here to see the LAUNCH Cycle video that helped inspire us to this project

 

here is a picture of me at the exhibition