For the past little while in humanities we have been studying revolutions. The driving question for the unit was: How Do Ideas Drive Change?. The main task for this project was; to create a Rube Goldberg Machine that was a metaphor for our revolution. The revolution my group was assigned was the Haitian Revolution. My group was made up of Jordyn, Taylor, Caleb and I. The machine also had to have a steampunk theme which I made a post on that you can check out here. 

The machine had to consist of at least six metaphors for the main events in the revolution. We did some research and the six events we chose were:

1. The French Revolution: since the French Revolution had just started things were starting to change in France, the slaves started getting ideas that they might be freed.

2. France had made the Rights of Man and Citizen which gave the coloured people hope. The white poor people thought there was inadequate discrimination and they started to rebel.

In 1791 the white poor people captured the city of Port Au Prince.

3. Then in August of 1791 the Slaves revolted.

4. The French were fighting the slaves, the Spanish and the British. The French knew that there was no way they were going to win so the French freed the slaves so they were fighting less people.

5. Since Haïti was still technically a French colony Napoleon tried to reintroduce slavery in 1802 and started a gorilla war.

6. The slaves ended up winning the gorilla war resulting in the victory for the slaves and the freedom of their country which was then known as Haiti.

This project was also part of our Scimatics class. So in that class we have been learning about circuits. We’ve learned things like how current flows and things like series and parallel circuits. We have also learned about drawing blueprint or scale diagrams.

This was our first blueprint:

This is the blueprint of the final product:

A lot of the time on this project was spent building it because this had to be a real working machine. So we spent a lot of time building it and then even more time tweaking it to get everything to work.

Since the medium this year is video, we had to make a video about our machine. This is our video:

In conclusion, this product was really fun because we were able to do a lot of hands on stuff, like building our machines. I think our machine turned our very well and we learned a lot from this experience.