2023 winter exhibition!
These past months, my class and I have been working very hard to make metaphor machines. We built them from scratch in time for our winter exhibition, only given a few weeks to build the entire structure. Before I jump into the process of making the machine and what we learnt, I want to explain what the project was all about…
The first thing we did to start the project was learn what a revolution was. I learned about the French Revolution, arguably one of the most famous revolutions of all time. I chose the French Revolution because I had learnt a little bit about it before, but now looking back to my prior knowledge, mostly all I knew was that people got their heads chopped off by a guillotine.
To learn a bit about our revolutions, We started by making an infographic about them.
This was a good starting point to learn about the revolution and what a revolution even was. This is mine:
The driving question for this project was:
“How do ideas drive change?”
When we have ideas, they inspire us to think differently, and take action. Ideas can lead to new innovations, social movements, or even personal growth so weather it’s a small idea or a big one, they have the power to drive change in a simple yet impactful way.
We were then put into groups with other people also studying the same revolution. Our task was to make a metaphor machine as a group. Each person was responsible for one connection of the machine.
To explain what a metaphor machine even is, it is basically a rube Goldberg machine, (a chain reaction of different objects that all work together to achieve a simple goal.) The way ours ended was to rise a picture of Napoleon with a pulley. Each connection was representing a significant event that happened during the revolution. Then we had to build our machine in the span of a couple weeks. This was a long process with many ups and downs along the way. It did help me and my team in the end work better as a group.
Building process:
My connection was the very last one. It represents the rising of Napoleon. To show this, I made a pulley to show him coming to power here is a video of it working:
I finished my connection pretty early on so I was able to use my spare time to help others with different tasks. One of the main things I did was paint everything to try and and make it as visually appealing as possible. I think I did a good job in trouble shooting and solving problems when our machines were dysfunctioning as well as coming up with ideas and helping others. This was a fun project were I could be creative and think outside the box even though many things didn’t go to plan. we had to make changes along the way but that was all part of the learning. If I were to do it again I would change a couple things but overall I think me and my group did a good job.
Presenting:
At the actual exhibition, we set up for two hours to transform our space. when people started coming in, we would present and then run through our machine. We also made documentaries to show the process.
In conclusion, new ideas spark change in the world, and this project is a great example of that.
This was overall a fun and unique Project were I have improved on my teamwork, collaboration, creativity, problem solving and more! In the future, I hope to do more projects like this!
See you next time!