Star Wars takes over Rising Sun High library

A stormtrooper and a member of the Emperor’s Royal Guard greeted students entering the library, and two 3-D printers were churning out Star Wars keychains shaped like Darth Vader’s head. At different tables spread throughout the room, students were competing in a Star Wars trivia game, playing Star Wars monopoly and carefully folding paper into Star Wars-themed origami or “Starwarigami.”

The Star Wars extravaganza on Feb. 10 was the first event put together by the high school’s recently created library advisory committee. The students on the committee came up with the Star Wars theme and then brainstormed activities to include in the event, said Kim Dyar, the school’s librarian.

“We want to make the library the heart of the school and we’re all about participatory learning here,” she said.

That participatory learning extended to the high school’s Computer Aided Design (CAD) class, where students engaged in a friendly competition to design Star Wars-themed items using the school’s 3-D printers. Savannah Wilson, a senior, had the contest’s winning design, a Death Star mug.

Going into the contest, Wilson said, she wanted to design something that was useful, but also easily recognizable. The Death Star idea appealed to her because it was a simple shape but she would still be able to add enough detail so people knew it was the Death Star, she said.

Designing the Death Star mug was also Wilson’s first experience with the school’s 3-D printers and Wilson said she enjoyed seeing a design she created become a reality.

Seniors Caleb Sounder and Matthew Phillips also enjoyed getting to see the Star Wars trivia game they created in action. The two used a program called Kahoot to create the game but didn’t need much extra help to come up with the questions — they’re both huge Star Wars fans and already had a lot of previous knowledge to draw on.

Still, some questions did require a lot of Googling and a few searches through the Star Wars-dedicated Wikipedia page to make sure all the information followed the Star Wars canon. One of the game’s harder questions, “Who was the first Sith Master?” took a lot of extra research, Phillips noted. (The answer is Darth Bane.)

Sounder’s favorite question, “How many times did Anakin Skywalker say ‘May the Force be with you’?,” was hard for a different reason. The question is a bit of a trick, Sounder said, because Skywalker never says ‘May the Force be with you.’

But the hardest part of designing the trivia game for the two wasn’t coming up with the hard questions, it was coming up with the easy questions.

“We both watch Star Wars religiously,” Phillips said with a laugh. “So it was hard to come up questions on different levels.”