When people feel compelled to rise to the challenges of a time when the dark side seems especially powerful, many of us draw courage, strength, and purpose from the familiar stories that have shaped us. So, it makes sense that people will dive into Star Wars as the Covid-19 pandemic and the public policies to defeat it undermine our sense of security and stability. On the one hand, this turn to the familiar people, places, plots, and quoteworthy lines of Star Wars provides a palliative calm. On the other hand, exploring Star Wars as a family during this time of extended time together can catalyze a range of developments, from collaborative problem solving skills and physical exercise to artistic expression and research skills. In the last week, I’ve been innovating purposeful, pedagogical activities to share my love of Star Wars with my two daughter padawans (ages 5 and 9). Through this short article, I want to share some of the activities and the educational objectives they embody so fellow fans, whether you’re taking care of children during this moment of social distancing or are looking to engage yourself, might try them, create spinoffs from them, or share their own original designs. May the force be with you.

Collaborative Creation & Problem Solving

Like a lot of people I know who were children when A New Hope dropped out of hyperspace and into our galaxy, I asked my family for Star Wars action figures and ships. What began as a modest collection has diminished over the years. But with all this time at home, I located the storage tub with a few people from Episodes IV-VI and bought a handful of figures from Episodes VII-IX at a local toy store. Now, my daughters are equipped with Luke’s X-Wing, the Jabba the Hutt Action Playset, a Tauntaun, the Hoth Imperial Attack Base Playset, and a Bespin Twin-Pod Cloud Car. For people, they’ve got C3PO, R2D2, BB8, K2SO, Rose and Paige Tico, Rey, Jyn Erso, Darth Vader, Poe Dameron, and a couple others. If you don’t have any action figures on hand, you can do what we do, modify other toys and/or create some with modeling clay or as paper dolls.

The driving element of educational play is mission design and real-time improvisational narration. We start by collaborating on a discrete mission. I prompt the girls to brainstorm objectives in terms of one really big problem to solve and then a few smaller problems that will happen between starting and completing the mission. With the skeleton of the story in place, they work together to create settings that they’ll use for different stages of the mission. This is where adults can help synchronize the ideas that children of different ages and cognitive complexities generate. I often ask my older daughter to imagine an ethical challenge connected to the physical obstacles that the younger one designs using blocks or rocks or other set construction materials.

With the settings in place, the children take turns as lead narrators. I encourage them to unfold the story through action and dialogue, and I drop in occasionally to pose the ethical challenges and explain some of the consequences of the courses of action they choose. As the mission reaches completion, I task my daughters to end with a cliffhanger, in the style of the serials that inspired George Lucas. We’ve had some good conversations about how stories, challenges, and difficult decisions go on as part of life. Akin to fighting the dark side, the current fight against Covid-19 will have some missions that succeed and others that fail, but we keep doing our part.

One more benefit for any children in the group who are more familiar with the films is that they can emulate Pablo Hidalgo as they reflect on the story. When my younger daughter, for instance, puts Rose and Paige in the Twin-Pod Cloud Car to attack Darth Vader on Hoth, my older daughter can identify the inconsistencies after their story is done. And if we’re feeling inspired, she can try to rationalize these anomalies in the galaxy by drawing on time travel of other science fiction conventions.

Exercise & Wellness

With all this time indoors, a lot of children won’t need inspiration to exercise as they’re able. That said, watching a particular lightsaber duel two or three times gives children specific gymnastic aspirations. As Qui-Gon Jinn says, “Your focus determines your reality.” A focused mind can turn lots of different movements into Jedi-level action. For an alternative to battle, we sometimes screen the training obstacle course scenes with Luke and Yoda or Rey and then recreate our own versions outdoors around our home.

Another aspect of bodymind wellness emphasizes relaxation, calm, thought. While watching The Phantom Menace, my daughters interpreted Yoda’s sitting style as meditation. They sit like Yoda a couple times each day to breathe and clear their minds. Relatedly, Qui-Gon displays in this film a forceful mix of faith and an embrace of ambiguity. His ability to hold fast to some commitments (taking on Anakin as a padawan) while admitting his limits (so many times he quips, “It’s uncertain” or “I’m not sure”) is a model for how to work for good in a galaxy of uncertainties.

Research Questions, Tools, & Skills

The way children encounter Star Wars today is radically, almost unimaginably, different from how those of us who grew up eagerly anticipating each new film and/or novel, game, comic, trading card set, and so on. Between online wiki resources and encyclopedias in print like Ultimate Star Wars (DK Press), whole swathes of information and data about the galaxy is readily in reach. Our family is leveraging these resources to supplement the creative play while cultivating research skills.

To make the imagined missions more robust, I’m coaching my daughters to formulate research questions so they can bring more knowledge into the process. What, I ask them, do you want to know about the planets, species, histories, ships, governments, economies, and Jedi and Sith cultures and lore? Within these categories, they work together to note questions, and if they stall, we open Ultimate Star Wars and use the info provided as a model of what to wonder about. Then we work together to seek the answers.

Once the answers are sourced, we turn to the critical final stage of research: extrapolating what the answers imply and how they connect to other elements of Star Wars. It’s one thing to locate and internalize facts; it’s a different thing to analyze and interpret those facts--to read them as constellations of meaning. My children can sense the value of this advanced research skill by using the mining or salvage economies of a given setting to shape the next mission’s objectives and obstacles.

Canon Novels are Kyber Crystals

Most of this article focused on exploring Star Wars with children, but I find my own adult need to recharge at the ends of these stressful pandemic days intense and complicated. I long for another galaxy to extract me from this one temporarily and immerse me in its alternative time and place. Yet, this isn’t really escapism. By hitching a ride on a transport built by Timothy Zahn or Claudia Gray, I want to learn and learn and learn what I can of resistance, hope, social organization, and leadership for when I return to the Wild Space of small town Iowa during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.

I’m a college professor of literature and film, and people are often surprised when I recommend a majority of the canon Star Wars novels in print. But I esteem Timothy Zahn’s recent Thrawn novels among the best Speculative Fiction today. Every scene deepens character textures and solicits reader investment. Zahn’s acumen extends equally to devising sophisticated plot patterns that span one or more of the novels in the new trilogy. As to critical thinking, you should check out the passages in Thrawn when the eponymous Chiss character prepares for missions by rigorously studying the art history of the peoples he’s about to engage. That sort of lateral thinking might prove equally valuable to our ability to rise to the challenges of our hope to continue coexisting on this planet.

To close, I want to share a brilliant moment that occurred after watching The Phantom Menace with my family. At dinner, the nine year old asked, “So, when Qui-Gon said, ‘There’s always a bigger fish,’ is that a clue that there’s a bigger menace behind the Trade Federation?” As people work to sustain hope these days, let’s turn socially to Star Wars to inspire, calm, and focus us across generations. After all, “We are what they grow beyond,”