What’s up y’all, it’s Jason, and today I’m going to inform you, the audience, about one of my recent projects, Metaphor Machines. In this project we learned about metaphors, machines, and revolutions. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Metaphors

So, we started with a little exercise to get us acquainted with metaphors. We took common school objects and tried to create metaphors about them. My group took a stapler and transformed it into a metaphor for love. In case you didn’t know, a metaphor is a simile that doesn’t use the words “like” or “as”.

So, “the pillow is as soft as a cloud’, would be a simile, but not a metaphor. “The pillow is a cloud” is a metaphor.

Get it?

Steampunk

Another element we had to include in our Metaphor Machine was steampunk. I’ve covered steampunk in another post, so I’ll just give you a brief explanation.

Memepunk

Steampunk is pretty much if modern technology had advanced in the Victorian era. Lots of gears, clocks, and exposed machinery. Also, I’ve found they have a slight obsession with the colour brown. Hmm.

We had to theme our machine around steampunk, and that meant researching all the steampunk aesthetic features and incorporating those into our machine as well, thus adding another level of difficulty.

Leviathan

Leviathan was a book we read that helped us understand steampunk a bit more, and to also spark our knowledge of one of our future topics, World War I. Leviathan was about World War One, but much more technologically advanced. The two opposing forces were the Clankers, who used huge machines and mechs, and the Darwinists, created by Charles Darwin who used fabricated, living creatures to battle.

There were two main characters in the book. Alek, son of Archduke Ferdinand, and Deryn, a Darwinist hoping to join the navy.

It was a really great book and I highly recommend checking it our for yourself. Here’s a link to the book.

The Industrial Revolution

And finally, one of the last topics we studied, the industrial revolution.

This kind of came after we started researching and building our machines, but helped us understand both steampunk and another important historical aspect: Cause and Consequence. We learned about what was created in the revolution, and what powered those creations. I won’t elaborate too much. Im sure you’re dying to see the actual machine.

Science

The scientific part of this project involved a lot of electricity and hot objects, so one of my main goals apart from actually learning things was not to get burnt or electrocuted. Fortunately, I did not get electrocuted or burnt. I may have inhaled some amount of spray paint, but hopefully not too much.

In science, we worked on a lot of circuit exercises, many involving the Phet Circuit simulator.

We used this to study voltage, current, and most importantly, how not to either get electrocuted or blow something up. We used our knowledge of circuits to create one functioning part of our machine that involved circuits. For us, it was the turning off of the red and yellow LED lights at the end of our machine.

There wasn’t too much Math involved in our project. We mostly worked on scale drawings and diagrams, in order to draw scale and full size blueprints of our machine. We also figured our the formulas for current, resistance,  and voltage, which are technically science but involve math. That’s pretty much it.

The Actual Machine

It’s what you’ve all been waiting for, the actual Metaphor Machine.

For the actual project, we were, as always, split into groups. Mine consisted of myself, Emerson, Sam, and Kiera. We then picked out which revolutions we wanted to study. We were assigned the Xinhai Revolution.

I won’t bore you with the details of the revolution in this post. That’s what the video is for. Long story short, the emperor signed a deal nationalizing all the railroads. People got angry, Wars were waged, etc. The machine took a heck of a long time to build, and ended up taking multiple changes to our original design to make work, but somehow, it worked. So, without further ado, here it is. Our metaphor machine video.

That’s it. I hope you enjoyed hearing about our metaphor machine and I hope I didn’t bore you too much. However, this project is not over. We also had various scientific and mathematic aspects to this project, so check out my Scimathics post for this project as well.

This is Jason Guan, Signing Off.