I like Rube Goldberg machines. I like how complicated they are. Speaking of which, we’ve been working on a project called ‘metaphor machines’ for the last month. For this project we were put into groups and were assigned a revolution and had to research it and determine some of the key events. I was in the Chinese Revolution group, with Emily and Kai .Then we had to make a steampunk style Rube Goldberg machine with each part of it being a metaphor for the key events we decided on.

First of all, everyone got a 2 foot by 4 foot piece of plywood. You could either have it lying down or propped up against a wall. we decided to prop it up against a wall which I think looks more like a  classic Rube Goldberg machine. Then we made a design to get a bit of an idea of what we were going to build, somethings of coarse wouldn’t work and would have to be changed later.

After that the first thing we did was paint the board to look like china from that era. Then we started to build. We hot glued on all the ramps, funnels and platforms to get this:

You probably want to know how it works so we made a video:

some things I would change about it if I could (we destroyed them wile cleaning the class today) would make the first switch stay on instead of just flickering on for a sec. another I would change is the same thing, but for the second switch. Instead of it just flickering on I would make it so it stays on. I would have also made it a bit more steampunk by making the board look steam punk instead of it looking like china.

overal I think the project went very good. The machine works well and the video is pretty good. We could have improved the two switches a bit but other than that it went pretty well