“Follow your heart but take your brain with you”.

Over the last few weeks, the  PLP 9 class have been building a machine.  The assignment is for the students to build a working machine that metaphorically relates to a specific revolution that we have chosen. The machine must show change as it tells the story of the revolution and it must have some sort of electrical circuit within it because that is what we’re studying in science. My group and I started off by picking a revolution. We chose the Russian Revolution because the war sounded interesting. Unfortunately so did another group, so we were stuck with Irish Revolution.  After we got our Revolution we started plotting out the main events, as they were going to be used to represent parts in our machine later.

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The diagram above gives a brief description of what our machine would look like. We broke the metaphors of our machine into four main categories that relate to Crane Brinton’s theory of revolution.

  1. The start of our machine represents how the ruling British government in Ireland failed. We have a piece of wood holding back potatoes, and when the piece of wood breaks (like the government) the potatoes are let free to go down the machine.
  2. The potatoes are there to represent the Great Famine. “The Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1852.” When the potatoes are let free from the “week ruler” they split up and take 3 different paths. One of them leads to a bucket to represent how many crops were lost to the potato blight, causing mass starvation which destabilized the country. The other two buckets represent Ireland splitting into two groups: pro-British rule vs. pro-Irish independence. The Ulster Unionists and the Irish Republican Brotherhood are examples of these groups.
  3. After the potatoes fall into one big path they go into a tube and fall. This represents the time period of war and destruction between the government and the people.
  4. After the war is over and the government leaves the potatoes to fall out of the tube and hit a switch as they roll past an Irish flag. The switch activates a light bulb which shines on a person creating a shadow to represent the dark past of the revolution.

Now back to the machine. About a week ago we started building the machine. We had plans for what we would bring in, diagrams, and a group chat where we could communicate and give advice to each other. It may seem like we knew what we were doing but we didn’t, and it showed.  The first day of building was a disaster… No one brought their supplies in, and we couldn’t get any work done. We weren’t on top of our work and the machine was getting done very slowly, and with the deadline coming up in a few weeks we needed to change this. The last few classes have been way better spent working on building the machine, and we were slowly climbing out of the grave we dug ourselves into at the beginning. As of now, we are about a little less that ½ of the way done. I have mainly been working on the building aspect of the work, as you can see me doing most of the cutting in the videos.

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Not only do we have to build a machine, but we have to document our work in a video. During most of the classes, half of our group works on the storyboard for the video and the others work on the machine. As of right now we have completed the storyboard, and we have a good start on recording the movie. I think the hardest part of the project is getting the supplies. I think we all work fast and well with each other, but it took us too long to bring in what we needed to start building.

At the beginning of the post, i used a quote. This quote reflects this project well for me because I love to build. During this whole process of the project, I have been learning and expanding my knowledge not only on the revolution and building but in working and cooperating well as a team.

Thanks for reading:

Michael.