Introduction
What you just watched was a successful run of me and my group’s Rube Goldberg machine. It is the outcome of months of hard work, research, building, and team work. A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that preforms complicated tasks to accomplish one simple task. Our machine is a metaphor for the Haitian Revolution. Every action represents a things that happened in the Haitian Revolution.
Our competency for this project was processing. We needed to be able to process ideas and further our understanding of revolutions to be successful in this project. The driving question for this project was “What Factors Precipitate ‘Revolution’ and How Have They Shaped the Modern World?”. If you would like to see my answer to this question stick around for the conclusion at the end of this post!
Learning About Revolutions
Before we started learning about revolutions we needed to actually know what a revolution was, so read a book called Animal Farm. This book represents the Russian revolution, but the book is from the perspective of farm animals rebelling against the owner of the farm. This book was very interesting and it made revolutions a lot easier to understand. I’m glad we read this book before learning about the Haitian Revolution.
We also learned about Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of a Revolution. This theory is that every revolution has 4 stages. If you would like to learn more about my understanding of that theory you can take a look at my Animal Farm infographic. It goes through how the events in the book apply to Crane Brinton’s theory. (Animal Farm Spoilers Below!)
Learning About The Haitian Revolution
After we learned about what revolutions are, we started to research our assigned revolution. I was researching about the Haitian revolution. We made more infographics, one individual and one group infographic. The one on the left is my individual infographic and the one on the right is our group infographic. To be honest I did not contribute much to the infographics because I did not finish my individual one and I was away when my group was creating the collaborative one. I will say that learning about the Haitian revolution was very interesting. I had never heard of it before this project because it is a pretty overlooked revolution. If you would like to watch a Crash Course about the Haitian Revolution to learn a little more, you can click here.
Creating Our Rube Goldberg Machine
As I mentioned before, I was away for some part of this project. My group designed the first draft of our Rube Goldberg machine without me, but they didn’t start building much before I got back so I did not miss much of the building process. The original design of our machine was going to resemble a table with a spiral in the middle.
We started building the machine and our progress was moving really slow. We had been working on building for a while and we had not been seeing a ton of progress. We built the base but when we attached the other elements it looked really messy and our machine was not working very well either. Less than a week before the winter exhibition we made the last minute decision to redesign our whole machine. It was risky but we thought it would be a better idea to make the design more simple and clean. We had to rush to draw a new design and we also had to figure out a way for every action to represent a part of the Haitian revolution.
After making the design we worked really hard to create our new Rube Goldberg machine. We tested it so many times. We also had to quickly make a script/what we were gonna say to people when we present. I think it was stressful trying to finish it but when we actually were at the exhibition it was pretty easy to present. I think every member of my group did a really good job at contributing to building our machine.
Winter Exhibition
The day of the winter exhibition went pretty smoothly. There were no big disasters that happened, and my groups Rube Goldberg machine turned out looking really good! I think it was a really good idea that we re-designed because I think it turned out looking a lot cleaner and professional than the original idea would have been.
We needed to have a food to hand out to everyone so some people in my group baked espresso brownies. If you research more about the Haitian revolution you would find out that the crops that were grown on the plantations in Saint-Dominque (modern day Haiti) were sugar, coffee, and tobacco. We obviously are not going to include tobacco in our snack, so we decided to make espresso brownies because they contain coffee and sugar.
Our machine ran about 70% of the time. I think this is pretty good. If I were to do something differently to make it work closer to 100% of the time I think I would make it more seamless. When our machine didn’t work it was because the marbles got stuck somewhere or the marbles fell off the ramp. The ship going down the ramp didn’t go a few times. So over all I would just make things a lot cleaner because I think the objects were getting stuck on rough parts of wood or pieces of hot glue.
Presenting was pretty easy because after presenting a few times, we all kind of knew each others parts so we were able to present when a group member was on break. I think we all did a good job at not memorizing and reciting the script. We were all talking in a really natural and conversational manner which was really good and a lot more engaging to the people that came to see our project.
Conclusion
As I mentioned in the introduction, if you stuck around until the conclusion you would get to see my answer to the question “What Factors Precipitate ‘Revolution’ and How Have They Shaped the Modern World?”. I think we can see a lot of similarities between when different revolutions in the past were just beginning, and our societies today.
Some of the main factors in the Incubation Stage (the stage of a revolution before the revolution actually starts) are economic crisis’, government injustice, weak rulers, and half-hearted “reform”. These are just a few examples, but there are more components as well. You can take some time to think and ask yourself if you see some of these things happening in your own country. These components of the Incubation Stage have affected the modern day world in a variety of ways. Lots of people are suffering from the affects of economic crisis, feel a sense of injustice, are disappointed in their rulers, and are infuriated by their governments lazy attempts to “reform”. These feelings can eventually can eventually lead to violence and chaos as we have seen in the past, and it’s even happening in the present as well.
Overall this project was pretty fun. It was challenging at times but my group worked through those challenges and I’m really happy with how the end product turned out! If you would like to see my group members perspective on this project you can check out Julia’s, Ella’s, Madeline’s, Maya’s, and Milaina’s blogs. Thanks so much for reading until the end! Have a great rest of your day.