Another year another exhibition, a time for learning, experiencing, and reflecting. This Winter exhibition really put me to the to the test, and pushed my capabilities. I learned a lot about myself, and what situations I work well in and situations that I don’t. This exhibition felt quite different than previous exhibitions as we were given a lot less time to develop ideas and follow through with them. In the end though, I felt that the exhibition was a success that I was able to learn from.
Our project for the exhibition was quite complex. We had to research a revolution and take the information from the revolution and transfer it into a Rube Goldberg machine. Each connection in the Rube Goldberg Machine had to metaphorically represent a significant event that happened in the Revolution. Me and 5 other people were assigned to the Meiji revolution. We spent a good chunk of our time researching, and trying to better understand the full story of the Meiji revolution. I would take notes on the more important aspects of the revolution making sure I was able to piece together the full story. My group and I then started the planning process, and each contributed a connection related to an event. I would say that this was one of the more difficult parts of this project. Just trying to get everyone’s ideas to piece together while being chronologically correct was difficult. This is where the collaboration started, and where we needed everyone’s opinions and ideas. Each person in the group was assigned a specific role to help the building process of the machine go more smoothly. The creative director of the group was Monica, and she was able to create a great diagram of how our machine might look.
Building our Rube Goldberg machine was next step. We started off slow making sure everyone knew what they were doing and how they could help. Each person was responsible for making their own connection and adding it to the machine, but we were all responsible for working together to make the machine successful. If I’m being completely honest the hardest thing about this project was the trial and error. We were able to get all of our connections complete, but actually getting the machine to be fully successful felt impossible. Test after test, we kept trouble shooting to see what worked and what didn’t. We altered some of the connections throughout the build to make it work. I tried my best to do my part and help out with each setup.
The day of the exhibition came and we still hadn’t had a complete run through. We were all pretty worried about setting everything up, presenting, and the machine working . As we were setting all of our machine up in the library, we tried to it again and it finally worked! Everyone was relieved, and I think thats when I realized that everything would work out. I learned that when you put a lot of time and effort into something, that it can really pay off. The actual exhibition was great, our machine ended up working around 10 or so times. That was a huge success for our group, and I think we all really enjoyed showing off our machine and telling everyone about our learning. We told them a bit about the story of the Meiji revolution and what each connection meant. I always dislike the social aspect of the exhibition and get very anxious about speaking to many people, but I think I did a lot better this year and I was able to improve my communication skills.
Overall, I would say that this exhibition was a success. The process of getting there may have not been very pretty, but I thought in the end my group did really well. We were able to overcome many roadblocks by working collaboratively. This project taught me a lot about teamwork and how to work effectively with the people around you. check out our project documentary below. ⬇️