Metaphor machines. Yes this seems like another 1 of the many projects I’ve done, this is just going to be another blog post just going over what you did. Well, yes but this one is more interesting I promise. Started off with a little junkyard wars competition which is almost like a DI instant challenge. We got a certain amount of materials, a certain amount a time, and a certain number of people in our group. Our goal was to make a machine that rolls a marble from start to finish, has a obvious start middle and finish, uses a few laws of physics and capture that all on film. It was a fun 45 minute activity, in my opinion was a lot of work but it was a fraction of what we had to do in our final project.
I thought our final project was just going to be a slightly amped up version of what we already did but we had to add a freaking light bulb electricity circuit to it. There are many types of circuits as we learned and made in simulators throughout the project. We did Kahn academy quizzes, Kahoots, used PHET simulators, read textbooks, did workbooks all just to understand how circuits work, how to differentiate them, and how to create them. In our final metaphor machine we used a simple double wired closed circuit with a singular lightbulb. Sounds complicated but it’s the easiest possible thing.
The process of making the final machine was a bit of a struggle because I was away for a few extra days after spring break ended which made us behind, and half our our group decided to not show up most of the work days. Me and Erik tried not to lets the obstacles stop us from getting it done neatly, correctly and attempted to get it in on time. Loads of tutorial times were went to while the board was in the process but we ended up doing it and it worked so we feel pretty accomplished about that alone. Coming into this project I thought it was going to only be about electricity because it’s science (as you can see on my project start mind map) but it wasn’t (as you can see in the picture of our physics machine). We are aware some of the words are spelled wrong and voiceovers scrambled up but you can still easily tell what’s going on and what we are explaining. Videos down below if you want to watch the machines in action (if not it will be updated into the post shortly).