Month: December 2017

Metaphor machines
Recently in scimatics and humanity’s, we ( my group consists of Lucas K and Kiefer H ) have been making metaphor machines. What is a metaphor machine? You might be thinking, well thats what I’m here to explain. A metaphor machine is a Rube Goldberg machine with metaphors for each of the steps.

For example if a ball roles down a hill it could have a metaphor for country heading down hill. Or if you have a pulley it could be a metaphor for a leader rising while another leader falls. Now that you kind of understand the metaphor machine, you might be wondering what our metaphors were based off of. Well have you ever heard of the Haitian revolution? Maybe you’ve heard of the French Revolution. The American revolution might ring a bell, but I am here to inform you about the Russian revolution. For the machines we used revolutions as our metaphors and our machines had to explain the revolution. Now you might be thinking what is the Russian revolution?

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Before I dive into the Russian revolution I wanted to add the definition of a revolution to help people understand this concept.
Definition of a revolution ; A sudden, complete, or marked change in something. This is the definition of a revolution by dictionary.com . In my own words a revolution means change, someone fighting the unright circumstances, creating a movement. It also means an adjustment in the system. You never hear about the revolutions that could have happened, or the revolutions that almost happened, you only hear about the actual revolutions, this means the “almost” revolutions were stoped by people with high power and the people got what they wanted. This was not the case with the Russian revolution.
The Russian revolution all started in 1905, when thousands of innocent people were shot. Bloody Sunday, was one day where poor innocent people were protesting there working conditions. The Tsar was away this weekend and his guards were on duty. The guards opened fire on the unsuspecting people and many died, here is where the revolution began. People were sick and tired of being bossed around so they started a revolution, the revolution did not really catch until 1914 when World War 1 started, people started to form protests and groups, and in 1917 the Soviets and the Bolsheviks forced the provisional government to abdicate. This was a big step for Russia. The provisional government had ruled russia for a long time and so change was a big thing. It was like the recent victory in Alabama where judge Moore did not win even though he was stated to. It shocked many people but it was the right move for the state. This kind of thing happened to russia many years prior, though in russia it was much more gory. After the Soviets had taken over, the Bolsheviks rose within them, and became the head of russia. The Bolsheviks needed a leader and thats when Vladimir Lenin rose up.

Vladimir Lenin was an author, and he majored in law. He was a very controversial person though, some people found him as a leader and a role model for removing the Tsar from the government and for helping the working class, but others cannot see that same side of him. Vladimir also lead many mass killings and he was a very persuasive leader, this leaves people with mixed ideas.
1917 another war broke out. This was the beginning of the Russian civil war. This war proved to show people the worse side of Vladimir. 2-3 million innocent people were brutally killed through out the five years that the war lasted. This showed people what kind of ruler they had, and would continue to have. In 1922 the Russian civil war ended and the Soviet Union began.

Vladimir was only able to witness the Soviet Union for a short amount of time before passing away due to his poor heath later in 1922.

Now that you know what happened throughout the Russian revolution, you might want to know how our machine used these times as metaphors.
The first step of the revolution was Bloody Sunday, so to represent this we had dominos falling down. We chose dominos to show Bloody Sunday, because the dominos are a metaphor for all the people who fell as they died protesting.

The second step in the revolution was World War One. A metaphor for the beginning of World War One, was a book falling. This symbolizes the quick snap that surprised many when World War One started.

The book lands on a wire completing a circuit. This triggers a pulley, which is a metaphor for the soviets rising to power. The pulley also raises a red flag symbolizing the rise of Vladimir Lenin, which is a red flag for the rest of Russia.

When the flag goes up it knocks a ball down a ramp. This is a metaphor for the provisional government falling down, and how russia is going down hill.

The ball rolls down and hits a cup full of confetti, and knocks it into a fan. This is to represent all the people who died in the Russian civil war. The confetti is people and the fan is well, bad news.

Though the fan does blow open a flag, representing the beginning of the Soviet Union.

So thats the end of my revolution project, I hope you learned something new about the Russian revolution! Below is the final video for our metaphor machine!

 

PLP 9 recently had a mini exhibition, where we had to create a inquiry question about Star Wars and I am here to share mine with you.

If you have watched Star Wars, you might have seen droids. You might have also seen droids fighting wars, but were you ever sad or emotional when they died? Thats what I set out to answer for our mini exhibition this winter.

My question is, when battle droids are fighting wars instead of people, is the purpose of a war lost with the use of droids?

I used the PLP inquiry star to explain my project in steps so the inquiry star is below.

Connect and Wonder

People can argue both sides, so I started with the droids, and tried to find more about peoples connections to there appliances. You can find some pretty crazy stuff online, I sure did! But I did end up finding an answer for my question. My search took me to YouTube, where I saw peoples connections to these household items, people were connected to washers, dryers, toasters, vacuums, cars, etc. These people would be devastated if they lost those items to a so called “war”, more than just loosing their money, they had an emotional connection to the items, like people have an emotional connection to family or friends. I decided to do a poll in class the next day, to see if my classmates had the same vision on there appliances. I asked them which one would have a more powerful emotional impact, losing there family, or losing there phone and social class. I was not at all surprised with the outcome.The survey showed that everyone in the class would rather lose there devices and social class, than there family or friends. It was not a completely fair question and the answer felt rigged, and it had not helped me answer my question, so I decided to find someone who majors in war trauma studies to help me with my question.

Investigate

I only had to email one person, his name is Marvin Westwood and he works at UBC.

Dr. Marvin Westwood created a program, run through UBC all over Canada, that helps people returning from war to ease back into there daily lives and also to help them coop with PTSD. I set up an interview with him and was super nervous, but soon realized there’s nothing to be nervous about. Dr. Westwood was very kind and answered all of my questions in depth and shed new light on concepts I hadn’t really thought that much of. Before having that interview I totally thought the purpose of a war was lost with the use of battle droids, but Dr. Westwood showed me key points that were new to me and and it changed my mind. I now needed to brainstorm what my arguments were for either side of the question.

I had asked everyone else but I hadn’t asked my self, I needed to figure out some strong arguments for either side of the question, it took a while but I got it done, and it showed me depth into my question, and I now felt that I had the information to answer the question.

Construct

 

Before I get the chance to actually answer the question I have to construct something that demonstrates my learning. For this portion I created a poster board, even though the teachers did not want poster boards, I thought mine displayed what I learned in a creative manner and it was not redundant! As well as having the poster board I also had a little BB8 mini figure that I created using my brothers soccer ball and some paper mache.

 

The BB8 figurine was there to support the concept of droids and artificial intelligence while also attracting attention. The poster board took a long time to build and BB8 also took a long time to build, so I did not have a lot of time to build the Star Wars playing chips, but I was able to find a little bit of time, and they turned out great! I needed Star Wars playing chips because at the exhibition it was my plan to ask people what there input on my question was. I also had to make a loop of some of the Star Wars droid clips and add them to my presentation! I wanted to do a lot more but I had to tell myself that this was enough!

 

Publish

The night of the exhibition came and when really really fast. I am not kidding, I felt time flying by! Though the setting up did take a long time. The teachers had divided the grade 8 and 9’s into two groups, the Dark Side and the Light Side. I was on the Dark Side and my group got the library, Yes! We turned that boring library into an area of dark force.

 

 

Inside the Dark Side we were divided into mini groups that were based on our questions. I was in a group with Luca (grade 9) Marshall (grade 9) Daniel (grade 9) Taylor (grade 8) and Jackson (grade 8). When the time came to be finishing up on the preparations our area looked amazing! And then just like that people stared filing in! I was so stressed out and I had no idea what to say to all the people, I thought it was going to be much simpler to explain to someone my question, but it was really hard! People were losing interest in my boring presentation, so I knew that I had to change something. I decided to lower the philosophy content and make it more relatable, talk about movies with wars, and how it makes you want to cry, and how when a droid dies nothing happens. I included things like the best clips of my interview to keep people interested. This helped remarkably and all of a sudden people were into it and asking questions and adding there input and, to be honest, I was amazed. People really cared about my project, I have never done an exhibition before and nothing I’ve ever done was like this, like a science fair on steroids! All the work was worth it, and I felt really comfortable talking to these people about my question.

Sure there was the few people who were a little odd, like the guy who refused to take part in my question because it included war, and then decided to ignore me, or the boys who pretended to be listening to me but were clearly there just to watch the droid wars on my iPad. But the people who cared made it 100% worth it! A special thanks to Chantal Jacob Zanker, who made my night worth it!
Like I said at the beginning, the night ended really fast and all of a sudden we were cleaning up. I almost wished there was more time, too reach out to more people, here what they have to say, but my throat thought differently! The only thing that got me through the night was Vaderaid, and that barley even worked because we almost ran out! (Vaderaid is just gator aid with a sign that says Vaderaid)

I left school at 8 o’clock and was very happy to be done with Star Wars work (I thought until I had to write this) but I was also really happy at how it turned out, and would not be to mad about doing another one!