‘How do ideas drive change?’ This was our driving question for our winter exhibition of 2023. We were shown many examples of of how ideas drive change in revolutions, and that is what we focused on showing and connecting in our metaphor machines. Our class of 50 people were divided into seven groups, each assigned to different revolutions. As you read on, you will learn more about my revolution, the process of building my machine, and my experience in the actual exhibition.

Xinhai Revolution

The revolution that my group was assigned to was the Xinhai Revolution (a.k.a. The 1912 Chinese Revolution). You must be wondering, what the heck is the Xinhai revolution?!?! Well, the revolution started because of power imbalance between the local people and foreign investors, and government injustice (when the government is violating individual liberties.) in 1911. Because of that, the people started riots on the streets, and 14 provinces declared to be against the Qing government. Because of that, the 14 provinces banded together and killed a bunch of Manchu garrisons in different cities. Because of that, the Qing government forced Yuan Shikai (former military leader) out of retirement and because of that he betrayed the government and sided with the rebels. The full explanation and timeline of this revolution is written on the infographic that I made below. 

Rube Goldberg

We had to learn many things to start creating our final product; the Rube Goldberg machine. In my opinion, a Rube Goldberg machine was the perfect way to present our learning in this particular topic since Rube Goldbergs are machines that work through chain reactions, similar to how revolutions happen because of small ideas which cause ‘chain reactions’. For example, in my revolution, the whole thing was sparked when the current government (Qing Government) took away the Hukwang railway project away from the local people and gave it to foreign investors. Once we learned everything we needed  know about our revolutions, we got to building. The video below is the documentary of our building process explaining the connections of our revolutions showed through our machine, and also includes a fun little drama skit we made inspired by the show ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’.

Overall, I had a lot of fun preparing and presenting this year’s winter exhibition. Even though we didn’t have a theme this year, it had the same elements of team building and creativity required like every other exhibition did. There were definitely some points throughout the exhibition when I felt like we weren’t going to make the deadlines or our machine wasn’t going to work, but we managed to push through and had a pretty successful exhibition. This year’s exhibition took a lot more planning and effort than I put in last year, probably because the project was so much bigger since this year’s was a group project while last year’s was individual. This experience helped put everything we learned on our previous trip to Loon Lake to use, and I was really able to fulfill my promise of working with a team and not a group. This was only the second of many exhibitions to come, and I can’t wait to experience and learn everything the future exhibitions will teach me. I hope this blog post taught you a little more about my revolution as well as my experience in this exhibition. See you at my next post!