Over the last month we have been using our Scimatics, Maker and Humanities classes for a very big project. This project was Metaphor  Machines.

 

In this project we started by researching revolutions and the steampunk astetic. You can check out my work on these topics which I saved in two posts. We read the book Leviathan and did a summary of Crane Brinton’s Theory of Revolution. The Metaphor Machine project is a culmination of those previous works. It includes the steampunk astetic that we took from Leviathan and the learning of revolutions from Crane Brinton. The goal of this project was to create a machine that would tell the story of a certain revolution from history through a bunch of metaphors. The machine took the form of a Rube Goldberg machine, these are machines that incorporate random objects which continue to create reactions in one another. My group consisted of Maggie, Owen and Melika and we were given the American Revolution.

This revolution was when America declared independence from the British after the British made them pay higher taxes. We spent a lot of time on our machine and I think that we did a very good job on it. We also had to make a video documenting our project, we included a full run through of our machine and we explain all of the metaphor that it contained.

Our machine is set off by a marble knocking a coin and then going down a ramp. The coin goes down a second ramp and lands in a container on a large wheel which we call the “Tax Wheel”. The marble that went down the other ramp comes back around the same time and starts the Tax Wheel. The wheel goes down a set path carrying the coin and drops it off on a platform which has a teabag balancing very carefully on top. The teabag gets knocked over and acts a weight on a lever which when activated completes an electric circuit. This then activates a set of lights on an American flag and a also starts up a speaker that plays the American national anthem. All of these have metaphors to relate them to our revolution which we explain in the video.

Of course this machine would not be complete without it’s main topic of the American Revolution and we did a lot of research on the topic before creating our machine. We created a timeline and listed all the major events so we could turn them into metaphors.

Overall I think this was one of my favourite projects I’ve done so far this year and I really enjoyed working on it with my group, we worked for hours both in and out of school to put the machine together and I am proud of the finished product.