“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” –Henry Ford
Two months of blood, sweat, and tears have led up to this day where I can finally say that we have finished our metaphor machines. Now, what is a metaphor machine? In my last blog post about “only being half way”, I gave a brief description of this. If you want to check it out, click HERE. Basically, the driving big or main question was “How does an idea drive change?”, and we had to answer it through our machine and metaphors. The machine must show change as it tells the story of a revolution and it must have some sort of electrical circuit within it because that is what we’re studying in science. Oh, and the machine also has to resemble a Rube Goldberg machine.
At the beginning of this project, my group and I were doing fine. We had good metaphors, a plan for our machine, and a timeline that would help us plan the work. That was until we actually started building our machine. The first week no-one in our group brought anything into class. I am of course guilty of this as well, as I didn’t bring the wooden boards I was asked to bring until a week later. So we started to panic. The one good thing about not bringing anything to build with is that we could focus more on the iMovie presentation that also had to be completed. The movie basically documents our work in a video and relates the metaphors in our machines to the real events that happened during the revolution. Recording the voice over for the movie was quite hard because we couldn’t stop laughing, and other groups often came into the library to distract us. Overall I would have to say Aiden (a member of our group) really helped carry the Imovie part in our project.
Now, back to the disaster which was the early stages of building. The graph below is an accurate representation of how our group paced the work we did on the machine throughout the weeks.
Not very well planned eh…..
Once we had the correct materials, it wasn’t actually that hard though to build the machine. It was mostly just measuring and cutting, for instance, the pipes and the plywood.
This machine is a 20 second video of me cutting wood….
After all the planning and laying out of our machine our group came up with this picture. This is a rough sketch of the final product:
And this is how much we had gotten done by that time:
It was safe to say that we still had a lot of work to do
Next, we had to include some sort of electrical circuit. We got the materials from the science room and put them together in class to make three light bulbs shine on the Irish flag. This wasn’t that hard because I already knew how to make a circuit before the project.
Now all I have left to do is to explain the metaphors, show the creation of our machine and to show our revolution. This is what we made the video for so I will let it do the work.
(video to be inserted soon).
Overall I really liked this project. It helped me learn a lot about teamwork, and it taught me not to procrastinate in my work. Now that it’s done, I still think that getting started, specifically gathering our supplies, was the hardest part. I think we all work fast and well with each other, but it took us too long to bring in what we needed to start building. As a group, we all took so long to get work done, so for next time we need to change that.
At the beginning of the post I used a quote said by Henry Ford. I think it reflects very well on the last few months of my life because when we were first assigned this project, I didn’t know anyone in my group. As the project launched into action I started to learn the strengths of my group members, and we started forming a team. At the end of the project, we were working together, completing assignments as a team and we managed to successfully finish our project.
Thank you for reading my blog!
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