Did you ever think you would be spray painting cardboard glued together for a school project? I didn’t, but it happened anyways, here is that story.

It all started with a revolution. Literally. This exhibition we were putting on was not going to be easy, so we needed to learn a lot in both maker and humanities, and it started in humanities.

We began learning about revolutions and how ideas drive change (driving question):

We learnt about Crane Briton’s theory of a revolution and its four stages:

I honestly found this stuff really cool, how Crane had found a pattern in all of the chaos of a revolution, he even wrote a book about it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_Revolution#:~:text=The%20Anatomy%20of%20Revolution%20is,French%2C%20and%20the%20Russian%20revolutions.

To show what we learned about the working of a revolution, we created a diagram to show all of the different stages of a revolution, here is the one I made:

I made it in the style of a recipe, and it is all hand drawn (except the text), and I am really happy with how it turned out. After that we had to chose a revolution to focus on, we were able to pick our top three, then the teachers would put us into a group; I ended up in the French Revolution, which I was happy about.

After we had done a lot of research on our revolution, we were tasked with creating an infographic to show to others to teach them about our revolution.e this went through multiple iteration as we refined, redesigned, and had our projects seen through peer’s eyes. I hope you learn something from this infographic, like I did from making it.

Version 1

  Version 2

It goes over the stages of the revolution, and also a brief timeline.

After this, we started a novel study on the book animal farm:

https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Animal_Farm/yDQJ6y2LSX8C?hl=en

…which is an allegory for the Russian revolution, and we held many book chats talking about the book and I think we learnt a lot from it, I enjoyed most of the book as a book as well.

Then we learnt about metaphors; our final medium for showing our learning. We did some basic learning about what they meant and how to use them, and then we watched some videos and brainstormed about Rube Goldberg machines. I used to watch a lot of videos about similar contraptions, but before we started creating one for our winter exhibition, I had no idea how hard it was. 

In the first week of building, we were all assigned roles, I was the engineer, and it was my job to make sure that everybody machines worked with well… physics. You wouldn’t have believed how often they didn’t. I was mainly helping others with their section for that week.

The next week, I had to work on my part, as it was the first section of the machine, and needed to be complicated as soon as possible, so I got to work, but just like with our boxes from last year’s winter exhibition, I learnt that “building” isn’t as simple as that. You can envision something all you like, but you can’t plan for sitting in corners for hours at a time, with 49 other kids talking, just trying to get these two pieces of cardboard together, but one broke, and the other looks weird, so you cut some new ones, but they are too big, so you trim them, but then you are out of hot glue, and when you find more and finish the job it looks awful, so you borrow the spray paint, and go outside and paint it, it dries, and you add it to your machine… and it doesn’t work. That’s what it feels like.

Once some things were starting to work, we had to try and connect them, except we didn’t have access to the space where it was going to be which made things difficult, and then we found out that we also had to make a documentary. Yay?

Trying to sort everything out with the machine, and making a documentary made things a lot harder, especially as I was the editor of the video. My section of the machine was a metaphor for the meeting of the estates-general, where all of the three estates of France (clergy, nobility, and the commoners) had a meeting about how to get France out of debt.

Once my group members had sent me all of the clips and the storyboard (which I admit I didn’t follow very well) though our group chat, and we had watched some short documentaries in class and learnt about them, I started putting them all together, while trying to balance everything else too, which was difficult, but this is what I came up with:

It isn’t my finest work for sure, but I think it came out alright.

Then after we were done building everything, making everything, setting up, getting food, and decorating our area (which took a long time), we were (kinda) ready for the exhibition!

The exhibition didn’t go to well unfortunately, things fell and group members didn’t come back from breaks and morale and energy were low. But like all things I learnt from it. I have a petter idea of preparation, and I have some Ideas for going into the next exhibition at the end of the year. But I am still proud of what we did, and what we made.

But back to the driving question of how do ideas drive change? I thought about this for a while and eventually came to my conclusion of: ideas drive change because an idea can be many things, but overall I think it is an opinion on a situation, and those opinions and thoughts are what people sometimes want things to be, and then they take action to try and make those things real.

Thanks for reading.