So over that last month or so in humanities we have been working on a project called metaphor machines. In the metaphor machines project, each group of four or five is assigned a revolution. With that revolution (mine was the French) we had to create a working Rube Goldberg . A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that makes something deliberately complicated and absurd. Our Rube Goldberg machine had to work and show the steps that the revolution took as it progressed and look nice with a steampunk aesthetic.

In the early stages of this project we learned all about metaphors. These metaphors helped us understand how we would show our revolutions in our machines. We would be shown something as simple at an engine running or a cog spinning and have to come up with a metaphor for it. For example if the video was a pumping piston we could say the piston represents leaders coming and falling out of power or it represents a fluctuating population. This step of the project helped us really have a deep understanding and learn what metaphor meant.

The next step of this project was on the revolutions side of things. We looked at Crane Brintons anatomy of a revolution and we saw what a revolution was on the inside and from both points of view of the revolution. Crane Brinton was a man who wrote the book The Anatomy Of A Revolution back in 1938. He said some very insightful things and was one of the first people to analyze a revolution in depth. This showed us what caused a revolution and the steps inside of a revolution.

Next we learned about steampunk and circuits in our two different classes that were designated to metaphor machines. In our simathics class we learned all about parallel and series circuits and how they have certain amounts of voltage along with amperage. This would help us make a part of our machine because we had to include circuits in our machine and they had to help make part of the Rube Goldberg process. While learning about circuits in scimathics we were learning about steampunk and the culture around it in humanities. We saw how steampunk progressed as a book genre early on and then it amassed such a following it become its own full blown culture with people making diy steampunk of all common and uncommon items in the world. As you can probably tell in this point, this was a major project with many lead up mini projects. By the time we finally reached the real project we were very ready for it.

In the beginning we were essentially given a revolution and a group (my group was the French Revolution and it consisted of me, Isabelle, Jessie and Luca O.G.). After being assigned groups we got a 2’ by 4’ piece of paper. With this paper we had to map out what our machine would look like in our groups of four we mapped out our machines with quite a lot of detail and this really helped us put it together and get a good idea in our head. Now that we knew all facts about our revolution and steampunk and circuits we were ready to begin gathering supplies and beginning construction. We got our wood/cardboard plank (2’ by 4’) and we started to make our metaphor machines.

During the start of the construction my group agreed that we should start with just the bare bones. Get the moving parts, get The important assets to the machines functionality and then we would add the aesthetics by spraypainting and colouring it. This was a very good idea. As it turns out our group got way ahead by doing this and it gave us a lot more time to fine tune and increase the success rate of our machine. While other groups machine only worked half of the time, our groups machine work almost every single time as long as it was set up right. Once we finished the technical side of the machine we now worked on making it look better. Because we had gotten so far ahead earlier we had lots of time to do this. We spent lots of time making our machine look pretty as well as making it explain its metaphors clearly. It turned out to be a great idea. In the end our machine functioned well, looked good and did a good job of explaining the metaphors.

Now that we had faced the brunt of the project and done most of the dirty work, we had to create a video. The video we were tasked with making had to explain the process of our machine, what our machine represented was and who Crane Brinton was and what he did. At first we made a first draft of this video and it turned out ok to say the best. It was missing some crucial information and our audio was quite unusable in some parts.

After a few days of revisions and reviews we a had really improved our video. The audio was fixed and sounded really good now. Th video editing was smoother and it didn’t feel rushed or thrown together, it looked good! We were finally confident showing it to the world!

 

Looking back on this project I think it was one of best or most well made projects that our class ever did. It did a really good job of directly showing us the information and learning we had to do directly and that really helped me get a deeper understanding and learning from the project. I would say that it was also a really fun and engaging project too. Although at times I was stressed about it and I didn’t want to do it, looking back it was a really fun, creative and captivating way to learn about things that you might not have found so interesting if you were reading about it out of a text book or watching a video on it. One other thing that I liked about this project that I found different from some PLP projects is that there was enough time to do everything and I didn’t always feel like I was in an extreme rush (although definitely somewhat rushed at certain points). Overall great project and I really enjoyed it.