Hello wonderful people, and welcome back to my blog. Our latest project was called Storm the Barricades! It was about how revolutions transform societies. We had to show this by creating three Rube Goldberg machines, and a final video, to show how different revolutions have effected society. First of all, what is a Rube Goldberg machine?
Now that you have an idea of what a Rube Goldberg machine is, lets get into our project.
What was our actual project? We had to establish historical significance and analyze the cause and consequence of different historical revolutions to literally build and film an answer to the driving question.
The driving question for this project was:
How do revolutions transform societies?
We showed how revolutions transform societies by comparing two different revolutions to a theory. This theory was Crane Brinton’s theory. He wrote a book called the Anatomy of a Revolution. In this book, he compared a revolution to a disease. We had to do a similar thing. For each of our machines, we had to create metaphors, one for each ‘step’, to compare both revolutions to Brinton’s theory.
What were the two revolutions that we looked at?
1. The American Revolution
2. The French Revolution
I hope that you gained a basic understanding of those two revolutions. Let’s look at the Milestones that we did, and our videos!
*a huge huge huge shoutout to my incredible group members, Erin and Josh. I could not have done this without you guys*
In some of our milestones, our whole task was to make a video, or one of our tasks was to make a video. I have put the videos below!
This was our first milestone. We were tasked with creating creating a Rube Goldberg machine to represent Crane Brinton’s theory. We also had to write a paragraph as a team to show how we understand his theory, and how we represented that theory through the metaphors in our machine. We needed to work together to plan, build, explain, record, and edit our machine, paragraph, and video. In this milestone, we did almost everything right…..except our machine. You can learn more about that in our video, and you can learn about our metaphors in this paragraph.
For milestone two, we had to not only modify and film our machine to represent the American Revolution, we also had to write a paragraph individually about the historical significance of the American Revolution.
Here is my paragraph!
What Is the Historical Significance of the American Revolution?
Now, we were on to the French Revolution. Just like our past two machines, we needed to modify our machine, and then film, edit, and present a new video. For this machine, it fell in to Brinton’s theory quite easily, so it was pretty fun to create. We also had to write a paragraph about the cause and consequences of the French Revolution. I struggled with the paragraph, because I originally wrote way over 1,000 words, and that was to much for a simple paragraph. With the help of my teachers, I ended up narrowing it down to one paragraph. I think that really helped get all of my points across, and I need up with a better final product.
Here it is!
The Cause and Consequences of the French Revolution
For milestone four, we were tasked with creating a final video. This video had to explain all three of our machines, the answer to the driving question, how our machines represent Crane Brinton’s theory, and they also had to tell a story. For the French Revolution video, my group went with less of a ‘here is our machine. This is how it works’ route, and instead, we told a story. When we learned about this milestone, we decided to do the same thing. This video follows Sebastian, a boy who lives on a farm that is owned by the King. He gets called to fight in the American Revolution, and his life transforms.
Now that you have learned about our milestones, and watched our videos, it’s time for……..CURRICULAR COMPETENCIES!!!!
We had five competencies for this project. How did I use these?
How might I use technology to create and communicate?
I used technology to create and communicate through creating our video with my team in AR Makr, and in iMovie. I believe that we communicated our story well, and we used technology to help us achieve that!
Have I used writing and design processes to plan, develop, create, and refine engaging and meaningful texts considering purpose, audience, and message?
I believe that I have used writing and design processes to plan, develop, create, and refine my work. I feel like I did this in my paragraphs about they American and French Revolutions, and throughout our Story Mountains, storyboards, and different planning sheets. I think that my group and I worked collaboratively on those, and that helped us as a group know where we were at, and what we still needed to do!
Have I respectfully exchanged diverse ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking using appropriate speaking and listening skills for the context and purpose?
I definitely think that I have! I can see direct evidence of this on our collaboration with our planning sheets, as well as our videos, and our project as a whole.
How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?
I feel that I showed this in my paragraph about the American Revolution. I showed what it means for a event to be significant, and I worked hard to understand historical significance and apply it to my paragraph.
Who or what influenced events to occur and what were the consequences of those events?
I showed this competency in my French Revolution paragraph. I feel like I explained to the reader what happened to cause certain events, and the consequences that still impact our lives to get his day!
I hope that you enjoyed this post! Did you learn anything new? How did you like our videos?
Bye for now!