The modern world is outstandingly different then it was a hundred years ago. New forms of government take control, the economy spikes and crashes, and the look of the overall populated area changes drastically. Sometimes, these changes happen over a long period of time. Yet other times, they happen almost instantly, and why is this? Well, the main factor for sudden and major change in a system is Revolution. For the past month in Humanities, we have been learning about some of the most ground breaking revolutions in history, and what caused them. We have also been tasked with translating that learning into quite the unique project, known as Metaphor Machines. Now if you want to know more about the project that almost burned the school down (twice), then read on!
Our Metaphor Machine
The Project
Like a mentioned before, Metaphor Machines is a rather different project. Instead of a video or write up, we get the create massive Rube Goldberg Machines from stuff we find around our houses and the classroom. Now that basic project summary seems quite simple, but there is a lot more to it then that. Our machines are actually a metaphorical representation of a revolution that we have studied (hence the name), and each part of it represents a major event in it. It also incorporates circuits and electricity for it is a collaborative project between Humanities, Science, and Math. To make it more aesthetically interesting, we added a steampunk touch to them as well, exposing the wires and painting everything in gold and bronze. After we created our machines, we also were tasked with creating a video demonstrating it running start to finish, and creating detailed blueprints of the machine.
My first sketch of our Blueprint
The Unit
This is our third Humanities Unit this year, and is all about Revolutions. We started off this unit learning about some of the major ones throughout history, such as the American, Russian, Xin Hai, etc. We also learned about what potentially could cause them, and what typically would happen when they were resolved. This was done through exploring something known as Crane Brinton’s theory of Revolution, which is a theoretical formula in which most revolutions follow. It is found in Brinton’s book, the Anatomy of a Revolution, and compares a revolution to a disease.
Crane Brinton
The theory states that there are four main stages, the first one being the incubation stage where symptoms first start occurring. This can be caused by many things, som of these including an incompetent leader, military victory, class separation, or economic instability. After this comes the moderate stage, where protests and unrest begins, but it is still done in a peaceful and controlled manner. After this comes the climax, when something snaps and chaos emerges. This is typically when the current government is taken out of control and radicals take over. Then comes the resolution stage, where a stable form of government is created and things return pretty much to the way they were.
Stages of Revolution
After learning about the different revolutions, it was time to choose one to do our projects on. I chose the Xin Hai Revolution (or the Chinese revolution) because I am interested in Asian culture and history. I was put in a group with Robin and Kai, and we quickly got to work on the first stages of our machine. Along side of our revolution learning, we were also starting to learn about circuits in Math and Science. We did this by getting access to batteries, wires, lights, switches, and more, and creating our own circuit labs to show to our teacher, Mr. Gross. This eventually lead to us creating the first draft of our Machine’s plans, with electrical circuit plans within it.
We also wrote some other blog posts relating to the Unit and the steampunk book we were reading, called Leviathan. If you want to read them, see below:
How does Crane Brinton’s Theory hold us today?
The Machine
Once we understood what a revolution was and what it’s stages are, it was time to researching ours. We looked at a variety of both articles and videos to see just what happened in China during this time of revolution, and then created a timeline of the 6 most crucial events. These would be what we used as our main metaphors in our machines. After we knew what they were, we applied them to a second draft of our machine plan, which this time showed more detail in how it would relate to our revolution. Then we created a third and up to scale sketch which had our near finalized plans on them, and were able to use it to begin construction on our machine.
The first thing we got was a plain 2×4 feet board with nothing on it. This would be the base for our machine, and we soon began to work on it. Now most groups spray painted it to make it look nicer, but I decided that ours would look aesthetically better if we painted it like ancient China. This took about 3 days, but it was worth it and I think it helped show our revolution’s setting quite well. Then it was time to put the basic ramps on. This proved to be a bit of a challenge for they wouldn’t all stay up, but then we found a solution in creating support beams underneath and on top of them. We then added some moving parts, such as pulleys and gears, and coloured everything with metallic spray paint.
The first part of our machine
Things were going pretty well, but we soon ran into a few problems. One of these is that our pulley wasn’t working, and we knew that it wouldn’t without completely replacing it. Because of this, we had to make the tough decision of scrapping a key part of our machine, and completely replacing it. This definitely caused struggle throughout our group, but through listening to each other’s ideas and working with them, we were able to fix this problem and move on with our machine. We also had the issue of our main circuit not working when we were nearly done the project. We fixed this though by collaborating with another group and using a circuit they didn’t need, fixing it to what we needed it to do, and then applying it to our machine.
Once we worked out the bugs, we were able to run our machine from start to finish. This was great, and we were now able to start creating our video. Luckily for us, I just got a new Canon camera, and we were able to capture some amazing camera angles and little details. We started off creating a basic, unthemed video, that more explained our project, but didn’t really tell a story. We then watched some of the other videos, and realized how important a story can be in making them interesting, so we completely scrapped our first idea. After that, we began to make a new video, but this time the emphasis was on the story of China and also focused more on shots of our machine instead of just stock photos. I also drew my own cartoons in a Chinese style to tell parts of the story and give the movie more theme. We then all recorded the voice overs, and added music + sound affects for the final touch.
Here is the final video:
What I learned/Will Improve on next time
With something as finicky as a marble run, there is a lot of trial and error. During these times where things can get frustrating, there are a lot of lessons to be learned and things to try to improve on for next time. From our project, one thing I learned is that less is sometimes more. What I mean by this, is when we created super complicated circuits and pathways, it would be confusing to follow and hard to get working. When we took along time to make simple, yet well made parts though, things ended up working for the better. Another thing I learned is that giving everyone a job even if it is small can be crucial in completing things efficiently and effectively. If someone in our group didn’t have a job, things would become harder to complete and collaborate, but, when everyone had a job, we were able to get things done so much faster.
If I were to do this project again, I would try to make sure my plan was realistic before beginning, for some things had to be scrapped when we were already into making them. I would also try to pay better attention to my group, to make sure everyone is on the same page. These lessons will definitely help us in future projects, but there was one thing that I think the whole class learned which is the most important lesson of all, and that’s not to use a glue gun with an exposed wire. This is because when you do, it might spontaneously start sparking, smoking, and nearly lighting the school on fire (if you want to know more about fun classroom safety like this, click here).
Overall, this was a fun and interesting project, and it will be cool to see what next year’s grade nines do for it.