Hello everybody, this is a blog post about our latest maker project -Methaphor machines. In this project, we learned about the concept of how ideas drive change. We explored how individual actions, decisions, and ideas have shaped events in history. Our whole project was centred around analyzing and studying revolutions. Our final project would be creating a Rude Goldberg Machine for a specific revolution of our choice. The goal was to create a machine that is a metaphor for a revolution. Each part of the machine should represent for an important event in the revolution. Lastly, our machine shows us how different events in our revolution/history are connected.

Our first keystone, we Crane Brinton’s Theory and created a Revolution Infographic. To understand revolutions we studied the different stages of a Revolution using Crane Brinton’s Theory. There are to this theory inbubation, moderate, crisis, and recovery. All these stages are charaterized by various events present in most major revolutions. This theory really helped me understand what a revolution is and the different parts to it. To showcase our understanding of this theory and revolutions we had to create a infographic on a revolution. I chose the american revolution because it seemed interesting. I first got started on some research on sites provided on basecamp then later switching to some other websites and sources. Gathering info was pretty easy, but I spent alot of time complieing. It was difficult deciding out all the key dates and events to include or leave out, but I eventually figured it out.

On our second keystone we analzyed a book called “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. A book that is about Farm animals that try to create a happy and fair society after overthrowing their human opperssors. Instead, the latter half of the story is about power hungry pig becomes a dictator of the farm that makes everything worse. This book is a good methapor of how in some cases the new system after a revolution slowly becomes the old regime again. If the people(or animals) in power are corrupt and do priorizes their own interests over the peoples. Our tasks for this keystone was mostly read this book and participating in book chats. Having these book chats really helped me futher understand the book better. Because I was able to pick up on key points I might have missed and I got to listen to different perspetives or interpretations of the book. Overall, this keystone help me futher devolop my understanding for revolution.

Our finish line was to create a Rude Goldenburg machine as a group and present in the Winter Exhibition. My group was the American Revolution.
Our first step was to learn about Metaphors so we could create a machine that represents our revolution.
Our second step to look at different Rude Goldenburg machine to get ideas .
Our third step was to indiviually find 7 important events in our revolution and come up with a way to represent it the machine.
Our fourth step was then to create a blueprint of our machine.
After that we shared our ideas with our group. Our group merged our different ideas into page to show all our connections that we where going to build.
We then presented our idea, got feedback, then created our final copy. And we also sketched out our blueprint to vizualize it.
Our next step after that was to create the machine, create a  documentry of our process, and prepare for our exhibion. To manage our work effectively as a group everybody choose one of seven roles to take on.
I was the scriptwriter and Exhibiton Visionary.