A while back, in late September, we began our second humanities unit of the year. This unit was all about the different revolutions AND the industrial revolution. Our driving question was, “How do ideas drive change?”. The big project was to create a Rube Goldberg machine. Each sequence in the Rube Goldberg machine had to be a metaphor for a part in your group’s revolution, and at the end you had to make a video explaining the whole thing. Oh, and the whole machine also had to have a steampunk aesthetic. So now that you know what we had to do here is my group’s video!

If you want to learn in depth about most of what we did in this unit and what I learned keep reading.

This whole unit began when I was was absent from school, because I was sick. The two first days I wasn’t there the main ideas that were taught were about the actual revolutions and Crane Britton’s stages of a revolution. So I was pretty lost when I came back the next week. The only thing I had done was a google survey asking what would be my top 2 revolution groups  not knowing anything about any of them I chose Russia as my number one becuase why not. I ended up getting in a group with Alex, Amelia, and Jackson, and our revolution was the Russian Revolution.

We began the project by researching everything about the revolution. I learned about the October Revolution, Amelia learned about the February revolution, and the boys researched crane Briton’s steps. We then talked to each other everything we learned and put it in a google doc. When putting it into the doc we thought about how everything would be metaphorically represented in our sequences. So we split it up into six main events (as you saw in the video).

The next part of this project was learning what steampunk was. As I said earlier the whole machine had to have a steampunk aesthetic, so to help us with that we read a book called the Leviathan. The book is set in a steampunk world and it was really good. I highly recommend it.

The other big part of this project was what we learned about in science. Everyone’s machine had to include at least one electrical circuit and some groups even had to. We learned how to make the most efficient circuits and how they work in science.

Overall I did enjoy working on this project but it was A LOT of work. We spent a lot of times just fixing little things that broke and it become so annoying. My main jobs were to research the October Revolution at the beginning. To spray paint most things and work on the machine as a whole. Then I wrote the script for our video and did my portions of voiceovers. I really like how our machine turned out as well as our video.