The past informs the present, so why do we keep doing this? In this project, we had to answer the driving question “What Factors Precipitate ‘Revolution’ and How Have They Shaped the Modern World?”  We learned about the stages of a revolution to better discuss how the past influences the present.  And in the end, we built a Rube Goldberg machine to demonstrate our understanding.

Revolutions From a Pig’s Perspective

The first thing we did in the project was read “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.  Because this book is a satirical allegory of the 1917-1923 Russian Revolution, it’s streamlined enough to make this historical event digestible. This book also made us familiar with the stages of revolution and made these stages easier to identify and categorize. These categories in their basic form are incubation, moderate, crisis, and recovery. (If you are interested a more in depth explanation, here’s a video.)

To put it simply, the Russian Revolution ended the Romanov dynasty and placed the Bolsheviks in power, creating a communist society. I really enjoyed learning about the Russian revolution and connecting it to the current state of Russia.

Mechanical Mania

After we studied our assigned revolution (mine was the Russian Revolution), we built a Rube Goldberg machine to represent important events in our revolutions. For those who don’t know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption that uses chain reactions to complete a simple task in an extravagant way. We were given a 3’ by 5’ piece of plywood to attach our components to and we used wood, cardboard, an unholy amount of hot glue, dominoes, marbles, tape and string, among other things, to build our components. Building the components, was extremely tedious and time-consuming, but the end result was worth it. This table shows the component and its correlating historical event

Component	Historical Event
Plinko machine	Unrest in the working population
Offset ramps	Government attempts at appeasement
Alternating chutes	The power struggle between the sovereignty and the provisional government
Spiral	The chaos caused by the military coup attempted by General Kornilov against the provisional government
Palace cut-out collapsing	The storming of Winter Palace by the Bolshevik ending the provisional government
Scale	The Bolsheviks gaining power
Dominos	The execution of the Romanov family
Newton’s cradle	The continued struggle between the Bolsheviks and the Anti-Bolsheviks
Elevator	The Bolsheviks victory, and subsequent rebuilding of Russia into a communist society

Executions and Exhibitions

When we presented our Rube Goldberg machines at Winter Exhibition, we managed to get our machine done on time (even though it wasn’t yet finished the morning of) and it even worked the majority of the time.

Everyone in my group had memorized their lines so our presentations were smooth and succinct. And I’m really proud of what we got done. Even though we did a pretty good job, I wish I had more time to work on it (I couldn’t because I was away in London) because it was very stressful having less time to create what we envisioned.  Along with that, if I had more time I would have been able to troubleshoot more and fix some of the structural problems that we realized after we finished construction.

I enjoy discussing politics with my friends and family and knowing more about what causes large societal events, such as revolutions, gives me a better understanding of politics as a whole and therefore a better ability to discuss them. As far as answering the driving question goes, revolutions leave lasting impressions on societies, culture, and government and thereby have helped shape our modern world.