The force is awakening at one Naperville high school.
Naperville Central electronics teacher Brett Thompson is using the power of the latest “Star Wars” movie to challenge his students to fashion a lightsaber that’s the envy of any Jedi padawan or Sith apprentice.
“The project is a culmination of what they’ve learned and the excitement around the movie,” he said.
Thompson is incorporating a bit of pop culture into his engineering challenge that is guaranteed to capture students’ imaginations.
Advances in technology available in the classroom are driving the force behind the project, a step up from the flashlights they’ve built in the past using cut PVC pipe to hold the circuitry, switches, bulbs and other components to illuminate a flashlight.
This year, the boring PVC will be replaced by a special hilt fabricated on a 3-D printer where all the electronics will be stored. A clear plastic tube will be added on the handle’s end to reflect the light from the bulb, giving the appearance of a lightsaber.
Or, at least, that is the goal. Whether the lightsabers are functional will be up to the students.
“Electronically it’s the same process,” said Thompson of building a flashlight and lightsaber.
Even more tricky for students is they can’t rely on concepts from former students’ work because Thompson has never attempted this project before in class.
The biggest challenge for students will be devoting enough patience and time into the planning and design work, he said. “Often they just want to jump in and start building,” he said.
Design planning, simulations, construction and a product testing, the basic formula for any engineering project, will be required, Thompson said.
While the course is called electronics, the class is more of an engineering class with an electronics focus, he said. “Here is our challenge; here are your components. Now make something,” he said.
“That’s the great thing about engineering; there’s no one right answer. It may not work at first,” Thompson said. “That’s why the prototyping aspect of the process is so important.”
Just as the first “Star Wars” movie that came out in 1977 seems to be a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away from “The Force Awakens,” Thompson said much has changed since he first started teaching career and technical education 15 years ago at Naperville Central. “Kids today have access to tools that were not available,” he said.
Early in his career 3-D printers were only found in large tech corporations or in research facilities at universities, he said. Now the price has dropped so much that 3-D printers are affordable for families to purchase.
Students today also have access to free computer-aided design programming and simulators that can run their designs before any material is cut and installed, Thompson said.
Thompson accepts that not all student projects will be functional in the end. “At this level, if it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I will be looking at the process” he said.
Grades will reflect an understanding of the process and not whether the lightsaber is operational. “If it doesn’t work, can you tell me why you think it doesn’t work?” he said.
“There are life lessons in this, too. Things don’t always go as designed,” he said.
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