Hello everyone, and welcome back to the first post of a new decade! Let’s hope it’s ok! This project was a little wacky. It was about….. Star Wars! Now that doesn’t sound the most most regular school topic but don’t worry, I definitely did a lot of learning. This project we had to create a short story about a minor character in the Star Wars universe and an artifact that supported our story. I have to say this was one of the hardest projects we’ve done in a while but it was definitely rewarding in the end.
How might we build an interactive exhibit which explains the hero’s journey?
The question that you see above was our driving question for this project. The two other big competencies that we were being assessed on were “create” and “take creative risks”. Now since I am grouping two different, but also the same projects into one blog post I’m gonna try and keep things a little snappier. I’m not going to go through each milestone one by one or we’re going to be here forever. Instead I’m going to give you a general idea of what happen throughout the project and focus in on the most important part. So let’s get started.
For the first couple milestones On the humanities Side of this project, we focussed a lot on short stories and the heroes journey. To open the project we did an opinion piece on Star Wars, we then did a short story quiz, and a hero’s journey outline for our story. All of these milestones were to try to prepare us for writing our story. With the opinion piece we were learning about how to use writing and specifically evidence to back up your opinions. For the short story quiz we read a ton of short stories and took all the lessons from the storytelling they used there, to then be tested on it, and take those lessons to our own story. And as for the heroes journey outline we worked with our entire group (oh yeah did I forget to mention we were also writing the story with six other people, everyone got a part of the story to write, I was part one) to design the outline of our story using the outline of the heroes journey (which is been used in almost every story ever). All of these milestones were incredibly important to my final story. I don’t think Id’ve been able to do it without all the information and skills that these milestones gave me.
For the milestones in my maker Project we had 6 milestones but they were all parts to the final product. If you remember my blog post from blue sky last year you might remember the launch journal. Basically it’s a journal that has many steps that help you to take an idea and launch it into an actual thing. The launch journal is what we used for this project as well. The launch journal has a phase for each letter of the word launch and I completed all of them for this project. This year‘s luncheon I was all about taking the idea that you had for your artifact and creating it. For my artifact I chose to make the advertisement that appeared in my story. To do this I went through several phases of the launch journal even to come up with that idea. After that I went through several different drafts and critiques and revisions to make my final product. This launch journal was incredibly helpful and it forced me to really think about my product and how to make it better. If I were to do it by myself I don’t think I would have done as many drafts, taken as many risks with redesigning it, or had really known the direction I was going to go in at all. Using the steps helped me formulate a strong plan and use my time wisely to create what I think was a really good final draft.
The Ads for my exhibition
The next milestones for the humanities part of the project was the Star Wars review post and our final draft of the story. For the Star Wars review post we had to watch any Star Wars movie and write a review on it based off of the information that we had learned on how to write a good review and back it up with facts to support your opinions. I found this task pretty hard as writing does not usually come the most naturally to me, but I think it was a really good learning experience. I had to try and figure out ways to use evidence from the movie to support my opinion, and it was pretty difficult for me to find. I usually can find facts to support my opinions while I’m talking, but I can never seem to translate them into writing that well. Overall I think I did OK at this task, but it’s clear that it is not where my natural talent lies. For the next milestone I had to finish my story. This was an incredibly hard task for me as creative writing is not where my talent lies at all. I was concerned for how it would go, but also very excited to give it a try. For the story I wrote several drafts, and even ended up coming to school early to talk to Ms. Willemse about extra feedback. This was a very stressful task for me as I am probably a bit of a perfectionist, and I don’t like being bad at things, but I’m actually pretty proud of my final draft. I ended up writing the fist part of the seven part story and it was the general introduction to the whole story. This was a really good learning experience for for me, because it not only gave me a chance to practice my creative writing, but it also gave me some practice on trying to be less of a perfectionist. Sometimes I probably do overthink the work I do, and I definitely get frustrated when things don’t come naturally to me. But doing the things I’m not great at both gives me a chance to improve my skills, and work on my mindset towards perfectionism.
After all of these milestones we finally shared our products to the world. For that we had a massive exhibition. On the night of the exhibition we divided into the groups we had written our story with (my group was Owen, Noah, Grace, Matthew, Thomas, and Finn). We then transformed our part of the school (we had the hallway) into a Star Wars planet. My group got Tatooine and transformed our hallway into a desert market, resembling one of the many markets on Tatooine. We did of course not come up with this on the night of, we made floor and design plans a couple days before. I spent the night explaining my story and artifact to the many people who made it to the exhibition. I basically tried to explain my thought process and development of both my story and artifact to everyone who came by. I think the night ended up going pretty well and my explanation of my process was fairly good, but I was a little disappointed with the decorations and I think with more time we could have fixed up some of the little problems (and added the sheets in the centre of the ceilings). In the end though it ended up ok and was probably another good exercise in relinquishing my perfectionism before DI starts again.
Overall I think this project went pretty well. I definitely think I managed to achieve the create competency and I put a lot of hard work into my story. I was not most talented at creative writing but I tried my hardest for sure, and I think I ended up creating a pretty good story in the end. And as for the maker side of the project I definitely think I managed to take creative risks. I redesigned my poster several times, but I think If I had more time I would have played with different colour pallets and different drawings. The presentation night also ended up going well as we managed to pull together our decor and projects in the end, but I’m still disappointed that we did not get to cover the entire ceilings with sheets. In the end I really enjoyed this project and it was a very good experience with me relinquishing my control. Sometimes I’m a bit of a perfectionist and that can make me bossy, but with grace in charge I got to take a step back and be more on the sidelines. Hopefully this will help me prepare for DI so that I don’t become insufferable.
Anyways,
Thanks for tuning in.
Holly
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