What Is A Rube Goldberg Machine?
Have you ever seen a Rube Goldberg Machine? These visually entertaining and interesting spectacles of engineering and design are the contraptions you have seen on the internet before, or made at home that often involve things like dominoes and marbles, and are a machine where one kinetic motion creates more consecutively through the specific and thought out placement of objects that fall, roll, swing and more! In this project our job was to study revolutions, and learn about these machines so we could combine the two very different themes in a spectacular showcasing of learning!
The Metaphor Machines Project that we did in PLP was all about Revolutions, and how to metaphorically show a revolution through the engineering of a Rube Goldberg Machine. This involved breaking down a Rube Goldberg Machine and identifying each section of the contraption as stages of a specific revolution. Different segments of a contraption would kinetically and visually metaphorically show a part of a revolution. In order to do this properly and understand how we could even do this, we had to understand and break down stages of a revolution. More specifically, my revolution was the Haitian revolution, so I broke my revolution down into parts like the slave resistance stage, and the climactic conflict stage.
Animal Farm
Another way we learned how to understand revolutions is when earlier on in the project, we read the book Animal Farm, which was all about a revolution of oppressed animals of which resembled humans in organization and human capability. It greatly represented the Russian revolution, with many hints towards communism and other themes. It not only showed us how a revolution works, but since it was itself a metaphor for another revolution, it showed us how we could metaphorically explain our own revolutions.
Animal Farm was a E-book that we were expected to read outside of school primarily, and did weekly book chats and check-ins to reflect upon and understand the book. I found reading animal farm to be a fun part of the project, and gave me lots of insight into how to metaphorically show a revolution. Since the Rube Goldberg Machine was our final project for the topic of revolutions, it was also the product for the Winter Exhibition of 2023. We were split up into several groups of different revolutions, and each group made their own Rube Goldberg Metaphor Machine.
How We Overcame Our Problems
Since my group was given the Haitian Revolution, our machine was all about the different stages of our machine marking historical events in the revolution. I think our concept and storytelling were both great of the Haitian Revolution, and Metaphorically our explanation of the machine was great. It was the execution of the machine itself that wasn’t so great, and lots of the contraption did not work every time we ran it. This was less of a problem once we learned how to pivot around it through more in depth explanation and storytelling, and so in a way it helped us improve our metaphorizing through speech.
Finally, I would like to conclude my evaluation and explanation of this project by saying that I found learning about revolutions to be fascinating, and it was definitely a learning curve. I learned a lot throughout the project, and I had a lot of fun along the way. Specifically the machine was the largest struggle, and there was a large issue with space to build a Rube Goldberg machine, as well as our group lack enough materials and planning for the machine.
