Destination Procrastination

A blog for kids who can’t read good and wanna learn to do other stuff good too

Metaphor Machine

Hi to anyone who is still out there reading this. This post has been a long time coming. Literally. As I mentioned in my Alberta post, or at least I think I did, my memory is not back to full strength yet, shortly after coming home from our Alberta field study I got a bad concussion. I missed a couple of weeks of school, and then when I came back to school, I wasn’t able to make it to all of my classes. In fact, I still can’t make it to afternoon classes. Fortunately, I have amazing teachers who have helped me to get caught up and focus on the important assignments only. Big shout out to Ms. Maxwell, Mr. Gross and Ms. Willemse! I also need to give a lot of credit to my group for this assignment JordynTaylor, and Fraser. They had to pick up the slack when I couldn’t fully participate or wasn’t in class to help. I guess it would probably be a good idea to tell you what the project was now.

This is one of those PLP specials. If I were to ask you what a dystopian novel about an alternative version of World War I, series and circuits, steampunk, the Haitian revolution, and scale diagrams have in common, you would look at me like my concussion had really done a lot of damage. But that is what this project was about. One of the things I really like about PLP is that we get to tie together concepts we are learning in several different classes. I like finding connections between things. It helps me to remember what I have learned. And the driving question that ties all of these things together is “How do ideas drive change?”

We were divided into groups, and each group was assigned a different revolution to study to show how an idea resulted in change in a society. My group, as mentioned above, was myself, Jodyn, Taylor, and Fraser. Our revolution was the Haitian Revolution that started in 1791 and ended in 1804 with Haiti’s independence from France. Haiti’s revolution started with the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens in France during the French Revolution. The idea of not only independence from slavery for the black slaves in Haiti, but also receiving full civil rights and the right to vote stuck in the hearts of the Haitian people. This idea was strong enough to inspire the most successful and comprehensive slave rebellion in history. It was the only slave rebellion that led to both freedom from slavery, but also to rule by non-whites and former captives. Not even Napoleon nor yellow fever could stop the Haitian people’s drive to bring this idea to life.

We then made a Rube Goldberg machine that represented our revolution metaphorically. Time for some definitions. A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes an object or action in a way that isn’t literally true, but helps explain an idea or make a comparison. And according to Wikipedia:

A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overcomplicated fashion. Often, these machines consist of a series of simple devices that are linked together to produce a domino effect, in which each device triggers the next one, and the original goal is achieved only after many steps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

Our Rube Goldberg machine had to have the different parts of the machine represent an aspect of the Haitian Revolution metaphorically. Hopefully you are still with me, because this is where things get more complex. We had to do our machine in the style of steampunk. According to The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, steampunk is:

Steampunk is an inspired movement of creativity and imagination. With a backdrop of either Victorian England or America’s Wild West at hand, modern technologies are re-imagined and realized as elaborate works of art, fashion, and mechanics. If Jules Verne or H.G. Wells were writing their science fiction today, it would be considered “steampunk.”

http://www.ministryofpeculiaroccurrences.com/what-is-steampunk/

This is where our novel study of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan comes in. This novel is a dystopian novel that is done in the steampunk genre and explores what World War I would have been like if it was fought using steam-driven iron machines. I found the novel to be a bit depressing, but that may have been from my concussion as well. When the steampunk genre is translated into art, its complicated style actually matches well with a Rube Goldberg machine. To further match the steampunk style, we painted parts of our machine in gold, bronze, and black.

The actual building of our machine is where Scimatics came into play. In designing our machine, we had to make a blueprint of what our machine was going to look like. Once we had our design planned, we had to scale the blueprint to actual size so we could build the components and put them together. Mr. Gross’s lessons on scaling a diagram helped us to be able to do this properly so we had a functioning machine. We also got to include a circuit that lights up some lights when the marbles in our machine run. A marble launches in the air and lands on tin foil. The tin foil presses into a wire, which completes a circuit that attaches a battery to a string of lights and they light up. I really enjoyed learning about circuits and the best part was the circuit simulator app that lets you build and try out different circuits.

And now, the part you have all been waiting for, the video of our metaphor machine:

 

And that is how a steampunk novel, circuits, scale diagrams, and the Haitian Revolution come together to make a Rube Goldberg machine that is a metaphor for how ideas drive change. Or how the idea of freedom had to pass through a lot of complicated things to become reality and be represented by a bunch of marbles rolling around the floor of the science lab.

calebe • November 30, 2018


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