I would like to refer you to two previous blog posts.  One about Steampunk and even earlier post about Crane Brinton. These two posts were all for a reason. After studying about steampunk and revolutions, we combined everything together into one project, The Metaphor Machine!

The basis of the project is this: create a Rube Goldberg Machine with metaphors attached to represent a stage in our assigned revolution.

First we were split up into groups. I was assigned the Russian revolution with Kiefer and Adlih. Our revolution took place from 1905 to 1924 and it consisted of the Russian civil war and the rise of the provincial government. Our machine had 7 steps – one for each major event that took place during the revolution.

After we chose our revolution we had to create our machine. We started by drawing our blueprint, a necessary first step before starting anything. The resources we decided to use would be dominos, pulleys, a bucket, plastic cups, a book, a fan, and confetti. With our blueprint we were able to put all of these resources together to make a mock up of our project.

Now that we had finished our blueprint, we needed to bring it together in person.
We split up the resources amongst our group and each had a set amount of items to find or purchase. My job was to get plastic cups, silver and copper spray paint, tape, a bouncy ball, and red paper. I found all of these items at Michaels.

Next we needed to start building. We had our blueprint and all of our resources, now all we needed to do was put it together! We started with a ramp. Our machine included a ramp and my job was to use the 3D Pen to make a support for it so it wouldn’t fall over. Once we finished the ramp we worked on getting a pulley with a motor.

In our machine, a motor on a pulley is activated which lifts up a flag, hitting a ball which rolls down the ramp eventually hitting a cup full of confetti into a fan. With the pulley, all we had to do was attach a flag on a string. Pretty easy right? No. We also had to add a motor to the pulley that would be powered by batteries. But how would the pulley be activated?

A book with copper wire attached to it would fall on the wire from the batteries, completing the circuit and activating the pulley. The falling book would be triggered by dominoes that when knocked over, would start the entire machine.

Now that we figured out the book, pulley, motor, ramp, and dominoes, we needed to get the fan to work. We tried many different strategies including just turning on the fan before the machine started. We finally figured out the perfect way for the fan to be turned on: a power bar! When the book falls it would land and turn on the switch on the power bar, turning on the fan! Our machine was looking good. Everything seemed to be going smoothly. Until we lost the ball!

We searched for an entire class for this little ball that was going to roll down a ramp and we couldn’t find it! This one ball was halting our entire project! Lucky for us we ended up finding a marble the same size so everything returned to normal. After we sorted out our ball incident we then started working on perfecting our machine and ironing out any kinks in its process.

We added a resistor to our motor so that the batteries wouldn’t overload the motor and possibly burn it out. After that we added a guide for the confetti cup so that it would always fall in the same direction. We also put red paper over the book to cover up the logo’s.

Finally our machine was complete. Our hard work paid off and we now had a working metaphor machine. Now all that was left was to create a video explaining the metaphors behind each action in our machine. I worked on filming our machine, and doing my voiceover. Kiefer focused on editing and Adlih worked on her voiceover.

After we completed our video it was time to present it to the class!

After our class viewed our video we received some feedback. We needed to redo the voiceover audio and work on refining our video editing. After our audio and editing were revised, we uploaded it to YouTube where you just viewed it!

Since my family originates from Ukraine and Russia this project really had a whole new level of interest for me. I was able to learn about my history in a unique and interesting way through our metaphor machines! I love how in PLP we can learn about such interesting topics while also creating something and enjoying the process. I feel very fortunate and I am very grateful to be in a program like this. I have an opportunity to do something different and fun and also learn at the same time. I think all schools in Canada would benefit from a learning system like PLP. My favourite part of our project was creating the machine and finally seeing it in action. I am extremely excited to see what else is in store for grade 9.