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This Blog Post Is A…

 

A quick recap: My minions and I have been building a Rube Goldberg Machine that doubles as a metaphor for the Russian Revolution. Last we left off (see link above) my group and I had just finished painting our metaphor machine. Man,  have we come a long way since then. Below is an overview of the work we did around the 1) Assembly of the machine and, 2) the Steampunk Aesthetic…or lack there of, as it were.

A Panorama Of Our Machine

Assembly

During the making of our machine, we experienced a few problems with its assembly. BUT! I won’t just focus on the negatives, I will share some of the positives too.

A few of the goods things that happened is that we were able to put the tracks (our machine had tracks that the marbles rolled across – the marbles were the peasants that kept the revolution going) the scale (represented the Czar when he was not listening to the people or his advisors) , and funnel (represented the fall of the economy) went on to the machine relatively easily.

The only problem with the tracks was that the wood was to hard to nail through, and we needed the nails to go through the wood because they held the track up on the machine. But we found a  a simple fix –  all we needed to do was drill guide holes for each nail. This also helped because we could easily pull the nails out when we needed to paint them.

The next part was creating the light sensor circuit. The light going out on the the machine represented the Czar giving up his power. The sensor circuit was comprised of a light sensor that turns a light off when you cover it. This circuit was located under a track with a hole in it. A marble was suppose to fall through the hole and cover the light sensor. To make sure it covered the light sensor,  I added a funnel made out of plastic webbing. The funnel caught the ball, as it fell and directed it to cover the light sensor.

The last part of the machine that we had to build was the hinge with the gear on it. This hinge and gear combo represented the troops that Czar Nicholas sent to stop the revolution but, these troops ended up joining the revolution instead.

We had a bit of trouble because we lost the hinge (there was a hinge stealer in our midst!).         But, luckily, that lead me to make something better. I took a paper clamp and put a gear on the end. This worked the same as the hinge (if not better).

Steampunk Aesthetic (or lack there of)

Our steampunk aesthetic wasn’t what we hoped it would be.

Our vision was that it would look sort of like an engine-type piece of machinery. Unfortunately, this began as a team member glueing random shiny objects to it. All I can say is it was not a pretty sight or what we envisioned.

However a Minion and I stayed after school one day so we could continue to steampunk our machine and make it appear more cohesive. We started by wrapping all the exposed circuitry in masking tape to cover up the clear plastic. Then we made a fake circuit-type-thing leading into the actual circuit. And I placed two bronze painted sheets of wood with a Clock in the middle of them (not as Victorian as I would like – a bit more Scandinavian….alright, it was from Ikea).

In the end, the machine didn’t work as well as we hoped or look as good as we hoped but we have a saying in PLP.

First

Attempt

In

Learning

To do it over, I would:

1. Manage my and my team’s time better – against other work we had due around the same time
2. Have a more detailed plan created before we began
3. Allocate very specific jobs to each person on my team (i.e.: aesthetics, building, story board, etc.).