Greetings all, welcome back to another blog post, today I’ll be talking to y’all about our metaphor machines unit.
When first introduced to this project, we learned a lot about circuits and the anatomy of a revolution (Crane Brinton’s theory) I don’t think I performed our circuit labs to the best of my ability and looking back on it there is definitely room for improvement, that being said I did learn a thing or two about circuits that I didn’t know before. For our humanities side of the project we learned about the industrial revolution, I think did O.K overall in our worksheets we were assigned before the “real project” begun.
Speaking of this “real project” what is it? Well it was mostly split into two parts, making a Rube Goldberg machine that would metaphorically represent the revolution your group was assigned, and then a video explaining our revolution and machine, you can watch that video right here.
Making the machine:
First our group consisting of myself, Amelia, Izzy, and Jackson sketched out our rough ideas for the machine, I think we came up with a pretty good concept but Amelia definitely stole the show with her great sketches for our scale blueprint. Now that we had our blueprints, it was time to make the thing, so that’s exactly what we did.
Our scale blueprint.
Except, we had a little bit of a curveball headed our way. There was a required aesthetic for our machine, that being: steampunk (you can read all about steampunk on my Steampunk Inquiry Blog), this meant we had to spray paint a lot of our machine’s parts into steampunk colours such as gold or silver. I think I went a little overkill with the spray painting, and looking back on it I should have been more focused on building and not the cool spray paint cans. Other than that I think myself and the rest of my group did a great job on our machine, but we encountered quite a few problems along the way, such as circuits not connecting, or technology not cooperating, but it was nothing a little creativity and persistence couldn’t overcome.
Making The Video:
The final hurdle in this project (not including this blog) was the video, incharge of the script was Izzy/Amelia, in charge of music was Jackson, and finally in charge of editing; myself. Although we didn’t have soldering irons in our hands for this one, it was still a lot of fun to make this video. Although Creative Commons has a lot of great images on it, it was surprisingly tedious to find images to match our voiceovers for the video, although I think the end product was fairly good, next time I’d definitely like to find good images sooner in the project. Other than that there wasn’t too many huge obstacles for the video, other than procrastination but that’s a topic I could cover tomorrow.
So, one more unit down, one more to go (this semester). As I already mentioned this was a really fun project and it’s one of the most fun school projects I’ve ever worked on. I learned a lot about metaphors, circuits, and most importantly The Russian Revolution.
As always, have a great rest of your day/evening and I’ll catch you guys in the next one!