So a while back, our teachers gave us a project. Well, they sort of gave us a project. I believe the criteria was something like:
– you have to answer a question
– you have to be learning
– you have to be able to set up your project in an open-house style, so people can understand it without you there to present it
–it has to be related to Star Wars
This all seemed like reasonable criteria, but it was a very open-ended project, and we had to come up with a lot of it ourselves. Because of this, there was quite a variety of ideas and subjects within the class.
The question I decided to answer (or try to answer) for my project was “what influence did Japanese culture have on the costumes of Star Wars”. I had originally planned to look into the influences of the time period Star Wars was created and the time period it was set, but I wasn’t able to find specific enough information, and I changed my question, while keeping the same theme.
I learned a lot of interesting facts about Star Wars, and about Japanese culture, and I discovered that there are more connections between the two than you might think at first glance. If you’re interested in my project, you can look here.
The link above was for a Prezi slideshow I created for my presentation, but as I mentioned previously, we had to present our project in a way that didn’t require us to be there talking about it. Now, my project was a difficult one to display without an explanation, and that’s information I’ll take with me for future projects. However, I eventually decided to draw a couple of the outfits from Star Wars and label the things that were influenced by Japanese culture.
First draft of one of my drawings
Now, the reason all our projects had to be displayed without a presentation was because we set them up for our parents (and anyone else who was interested) to look at as an open house. In order to make it more enjoyable for the people looking at our projects, we were divided into groups based on the subject of our project, and assigned a planet from Star Wars and an area of the school to decorate like that planet.
Now, my group was doing projects mostly about the design for the costumes and sets of Star Wars, although it varied a bit. However, that was not important to which space and planet we were assigned. As it happened, we were responsible for turning the back of our school library into Dagobah (the planet where Luke meets Yoda).
Besides decorating the library and setting up our projects, we also had to find food and an engagement piece for the people looking at our projects. A girl in my group made cookies that looked like Yoda and we served green Gatorade, which did a good job of keeping any children there happy. As for the engagement, we borrowed a drone, made to look like one of the droids from Star Wars, from our teachers, and gave people a chance to try controlling it through an app downloaded on my phone.
The library as Dagobah
I had a lot of fun working on this project, although I wish we had had more time to plan and find materials for creating Dagobah. If I were going to do this project again, I think I would have used the time I did have more wisely, and I would have liked to have found more information, because I found what I did learn quite interesting.
Well, that’s all for now. I’ve got to go save the galaxy…
Toodles.
