What do you get when you add revolutions, and Rube Goldberg machines together? Well, a lot of chaos and a very cool project to share with people at the winter exhibition. This project consisted of two main parts. Learning everything about our revolutions and building our machine. Once we gained a strong understanding of our revolution, we thought of actions in a Rube Goldberg machine, that could serve as a metaphor for different events in a revolution. I chose to do the Meiji Revolution, or restoration, located in Japan.
While understanding this revolution I learned a lot. We had various assignments that helped us ultimately know of our revolution. We learned that a revolution is an accumulation of people who wanted change. In my revolution, it was because they didn’t like how the old emperor was running things. I learned that one small idea spoken loud enough, can change the course of history. A major part of our project was learning who Crane Brinton was and how he came up with a set of characteristics that revolutions follow. We call this the Crane-Brinton diagram: Before the revolution starts there are always signs that show before, this is called the incubation stage. Next is the moderate stage, which is when you will see weak or incompetent rulers. Because of these rulers, we then get into a crisis stage which is when war and heavy violence occurs. When the revolution is over, the country usually chooses between peace, or going back to war. In the resolution of the revolution, the country will most likely learn from the past and update its society. I learned how the events in the Meiji Revolution followed this diagram. See below, the infographic I made which explains this!
Now comes the fun part! Building our Rube Goldberg Machine! Simply, a Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that performs a series of movements to ultimately achieve a simple task. In our case, those movements had to be something we thought portrayed an event in our revolution. In my group, everyone brought excellent ideas for what our connections could be. With the help of everyone’s ideas and creativity, we ended up with a machine that worked! We had a successful machine because we had a good foundation. Our group had a detailed plan with everyone on the same page. We took it one connection at a time and we learned that taking the time to ensure each connection worked, was more beneficial than just trying to throw stuff on a board as quickly as we could. There were times when some of the machine worked, and others didn’t. Then there were times when nothing worked, we had failed and we felt like giving up. But we learned that just because you fail, doesn’t mean you need to give up. Failing means something didn’t work. You can fail 999,999, but not once have you ever given up. To fail is to learn and to learn is to fail. If you fail you should not give up. We let the word failure hurt us so much, but why? Just because something doesn’t work, doesn’t mean it won’t. What happens if the 1,000,000 time you try, you succeed? This is the mentality our group brought because if something didn’t work we would say “Let’s try it again!” we tried to figure out what was wrong so we could fix it. I am very proud of my group for doing this because it brought us major success. See the process of us building our machine in this video!
In this project, I tried to be a leader. I tried to ensure our group stayed organized and everyone was on task. I ensured everyone was on the same page, and knew what jobs needed to be done. During this project, I tried using the things I learned from Loon Lake. I said thank you and was more encouraging. If I asked someone to do something after I would say something like “Thank you so much that was so helpful! It looks really good!” I hope this made my group members feel appreciated and they know the work they did, didn’t go unnoticed. I also worked on my transfer goal during this project. At times I was annoyed, frustrated, and not feeling too good about our machine. During these times I reminded myself to keep an open mind and stay positive. You never know what’s going to happen! The last thing I tried to work on was giving people jobs that they are good at, and want to do. We had people in our group who were super creative and loved art. They were in charge of the aesthetics of our machine. Looking at each group member’s skill set, really helped divide all the tasks and ensured everyone enjoyed the task they were doing.
Although this project had its ups and downs, I am extremely proud of myself, and my group for pushing through, and ending up with a machine that worked! Going into this I was a little skeptical about how we were going to build our machine and have it work on such a big scale. My group did a great job coming together to create our final product. This was a super fun project consisting of many laughs and fun times! I learned so much from this project and I am excited to transfer my learning into other projects throughout this year!
Syddy giddy out ✌️