Welcome to the world of Asian Invasion! Yes, ironically enough, my whole group for this project was made up of Chinese kids. We were Guan, Wong, Chong and Cui. But don’t be fooled! Just cause we’re all Asian doesn’t mean we’re all psycho geniuses at math nor are we all crazy rich. Infact, for this project, us group of Asians work fairly well together.

Our combination of strengths helped us accomplish this project mostly stress free! We had our own special roles which benefited the team well! We had Jason (Guan) the math genius, Emerson or Foghorn (Chong), whichever you prefer as our main presenter. If you haven’t already figured it out after reading his nickname, he’s best suited to the presenter role due to his unbelievably loud voice. Then there was Sam (Cui) our main builder and designer. After building a solid structure that was able to withstand over 200lbs of weights at Destination Imagination, we all had to agree that he had talent! Finally, there’s me. The writer/note taker. Yes I LOVE taking notes and writing! So as you can see everything basically went pretty smoothly. Either than the boys being unionized and having to take a break every 15 minutes (thanks boys 🙄).

Our project was to create a Metaphor Machine which would show the story of our given revolution. And weirdly the Chinese got the Chinese Revolution or in this case, the Xinhai Revolution.

To read about metaphors and other poetic terms, click here!

We all then did some research on our revolution so we’d know the details on how it started, what happened and the outcome of the revolution. To make this slightly easier on all of us, my group decided to divide our research into the four stages. Each of us would research about one stage.

Now, your probably wondering what on earth is Kiera talking about when she says a “stage”. Well, all revolutions can be devided into Four Stages: Incubation, Moderate, Crisis and Revovery stages. This was designed by a man named Crane Brinton thus known as the Crane Brinton Theory. A revolution, like a disease begins with the Incubation Stage where an event occurs causing people to become angry or unsatisfied about something. This could occur through an economic crisis, a week ruler or simply not being payed enough. This then leads to the Moderate Stage where small protests occure but not a lot of violence. The revolution then moves to the Crisis stage where wars are waged and many politicians or leaders are killed in battle. After this comes the recovery stage where everything begins to settle down and return to normal.

Once the research was done, it was time to draw our machine diagram. This would show all the necessary dimensions we’d need to know before cutting out the cardboard pieces. Jason and Sam drew the first diagram and Emerson and I drew the full sized one. Once that was done, it was time to start building!

In Scimatix, we had been learning about circuits and electricity. This project was a chance for each of us to show our knowledge in circuits as a circuit had to be included in our machine. Sam and Emerson expertly created a circuit to simulate the emperor loosing power which ended the revolution.

The construction of our machine wasn’t an easy process. Not only did each Metaphor have to represent a key event in the Xinhai Revolution but the machine also had to match the Steampunk aesthetic. This meant lists of exposed machinery such as nails red, copper, go,d and silvery colours and older looking designs. Like researching, we devided the jobs up to complete the task faster. Just as if we were an assembly line in a factory, I began by cutting out the raw pieces of cardboard in the shapes and sizes I had taken note of during our drawing of the diagram. The pieces would then be handed to Jason who spray painted and dried the cardboard which would then be handed to Sam and Emerson who carefully glued and measured each piece into place. What a team!? The process was not only fast but fun! Not only did I learn to properly spray paint, but also to loosen up and not worry!

The creation of our video was simple enough, I mainly did the filming and editing and Jason mainly created the music. We decided to stick with our a Chinese theme by creating traditional Chinese music on the Garage Band App. The sad part was disassembling our machines. After weeks of hard work, our mighty Metaphor Machine ended up as no more than a stack of spray painted cardboard in the recycling bin.