Metaphor machines
Recently in scimatics and humanity’s, we ( my group consists of Lucas K and Kiefer H ) have been making metaphor machines. What is a metaphor machine? You might be thinking, well thats what I’m here to explain. A metaphor machine is a Rube Goldberg machine with metaphors for each of the steps.
For example if a ball roles down a hill it could have a metaphor for country heading down hill. Or if you have a pulley it could be a metaphor for a leader rising while another leader falls. Now that you kind of understand the metaphor machine, you might be wondering what our metaphors were based off of. Well have you ever heard of the Haitian revolution? Maybe you’ve heard of the French Revolution. The American revolution might ring a bell, but I am here to inform you about the Russian revolution. For the machines we used revolutions as our metaphors and our machines had to explain the revolution. Now you might be thinking what is the Russian revolution?
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Before I dive into the Russian revolution I wanted to add the definition of a revolution to help people understand this concept.
Definition of a revolution ; A sudden, complete, or marked change in something. This is the definition of a revolution by dictionary.com . In my own words a revolution means change, someone fighting the unright circumstances, creating a movement. It also means an adjustment in the system. You never hear about the revolutions that could have happened, or the revolutions that almost happened, you only hear about the actual revolutions, this means the “almost” revolutions were stoped by people with high power and the people got what they wanted. This was not the case with the Russian revolution.
The Russian revolution all started in 1905, when thousands of innocent people were shot. 
Bloody Sunday, was one day where poor innocent people were protesting there working conditions. The Tsar was away this weekend and his guards were on duty. The guards opened fire on the unsuspecting people and many died, here is where the revolution began. People were sick and tired of being bossed around so they started a revolution, the revolution did not really catch until 1914 when World War 1 started, people started to form protests and groups, and in 1917 the Soviets and the Bolsheviks forced the provisional government to abdicate. 
This was a big step for Russia. The provisional government had ruled russia for a long time and so change was a big thing. It was like the recent victory in Alabama where judge Moore did not win even though he was stated to. It shocked many people but it was the right move for the state. This kind of thing happened to russia many years prior, though in russia it was much more gory. After the Soviets had taken over, the Bolsheviks rose within them, and became the head of russia. The Bolsheviks needed a leader and thats when Vladimir Lenin rose up.
Vladimir Lenin was an author, and he majored in law. He was a very controversial person though, some people found him as a leader and a role model for removing the Tsar from the government and for helping the working class, but others cannot see that same side of him. Vladimir also lead many mass killings and he was a very persuasive leader, this leaves people with mixed ideas.
1917 another war broke out. This was the beginning of the Russian civil war. This war proved to show people the worse side of Vladimir. 2-3 million innocent people were brutally killed through out the five years that the war lasted. This showed people what kind of ruler they had, and would continue to have. In 1922 the Russian civil war ended and the Soviet Union began.
Vladimir was only able to witness the Soviet Union for a short amount of time before passing away due to his poor heath later in 1922.
Now that you know what happened throughout the Russian revolution, you might want to know how our machine used these times as metaphors.
The first step of the revolution was Bloody Sunday, so to represent this we had dominos falling down. We chose dominos to show Bloody Sunday, because the dominos are a metaphor for all the people who fell as they died protesting.
The second step in the revolution was World War One. A metaphor for the beginning of World War One, was a book falling. This symbolizes the quick snap that surprised many when World War One started.
The book lands on a wire completing a circuit. This triggers a pulley, which is a metaphor for the soviets rising to power. The pulley also raises a red flag symbolizing the rise of Vladimir Lenin, which is a red flag for the rest of Russia.
When the flag goes up it knocks a ball down a ramp. This is a metaphor for the provisional government falling down, and how russia is going down hill.
The ball rolls down and hits a cup full of confetti, and knocks it into a fan. This is to represent all the people who died in the Russian civil war. The confetti is people and the fan is well, bad news.
Though the fan does blow open a flag, representing the beginning of the Soviet Union.
So thats the end of my revolution project, I hope you learned something new about the Russian revolution! Below is the final video for our metaphor machine!
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