Math and Star Wars

  Star Wars, the first movie was released back in 1977 to huge audiences.  It made enough to lead to two more movies before a break.  Eventually the three movies covering the time before the originals were released.  Who can forget JarJar Binks with his bounciness and ability to drive adults crazy?  Now we are up to the 2nd of the last three in the 9 movie concept.  And - The series has spurned two other movies, Rogue One and Han Solo both giving more background to the Star Wars universe.

Fortunately there is a math activities available via Yummy Math to use to analyze the net profit based on production costs and world wide gross.  The activity also brings into account the idea of inflation and how the costs were different in 1977 vs now.  Back then a Hershey bar was only 20 cents rather than the $1.00 of today.  Students are introduced to inflation calculators so they understand the concept of in 2018 dollars when they see the comment.

We always want to incorporate reading into our math classes so students become better at interpreting what they read. There is this great article which does a statistical analysis of the different worlds found in the Star Wars movies.  They used Graph Theory to analysis the information to reach certain interesting conclusions.  For students such as mine who hate to read, you can create a sheet to accompany the reading so they look for specific information or the questions could require some mathematical calculations and conclusions based on the information.

Mathematic shed has a variety of activities for a variety of ages.  Some require solving equations while others require students to propose a hypothesis on what a certain number might represent.  There is also an infographic on the cost of the Death Star, students can use to find the answers to questions you create.  There are some for adding basic numbers for elementary students but I ignored those because they are a bit young for my students.

Then this site has a nice activity for creating a Star Wars Galaxy similar to the activity students do in the gym to set up the solar system.  The good thing for my students with this activity is that it requires students to convert from metric to standard which is something they struggle with.

This site has links to 15 activities based on Star Wars including a coordinate plane activity, fraction activity,  and drawing R2D2 which some of my students would enjoy.  Although many are geared for elementary students, a few are geared for older ones.

I may have to have a sub for the first couple days of class this year so I may set up a unit starting with one of the movies, followed by some of these math activities to ease my students back into work.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.