Hello, welcome to my blog! As you know in PLP every year we take part in a winter exhibition to showcase our work to the public! This year we made metaphor machines that showcases a revolution. It sounds simple but the process was a long a bumpy road, so let’s start from the beginning!
In this project I learned that revolutions have influenced our political, social, economic, and cultural worldview. To help learn this we started by analyzing a book called “Animal Farm”
“Animal Farm”
In this project we analyzed the book “Animal Farm” this book is based on the Russian revolution where animals represent what happened in the revolution. The main reason we read this book was to understand Cranes Briton’s theory on the stages of revolution. Here are my notes on the book and Crane Briton’s theory:
After we used our notes to create an infographic combining our knowledge of “Animal Farm” with Crane Briton’s theory. Here is my infographic with my critiques from my teacher:
You can see it got critiqued a lot on my first draft so I took all this feedback and applied it to my final draft:
French Revolution
Now that we had finished our infographic Mr Harris wanted us to apply Crane Briton’s theory to a real world revolution. So our whole class was divided into 5 groups with different revolutions. I got the French Revolution and so did Elsa, Carmyn, Sam, Lianne, and Evelyn. This would also be our winter exhibition groups. Our first task was to make an infographic combining Crane Briton’s theory and the French Revolution. First we had to do some research on the French Revolution and luckily Mr Harris had a lot of good sources for us to read and take note. So after all the research and critiquing of each others infographics we finally had our final draft:
So once we were done our Infographic we were now beginning the start of the winter exhibition!
Process of the Winter Exhibition
So first we had to combine all our knowledge together creating one legendary Infographic to showcase at the exhibition! Here is a picture of it:
Now that we had finished our groups legendary infographic we were tasked to make a Metaphor machine on the French Revolution.
What is a metaphor machine?
A metaphor machine is a rube goldberg machine where each action of the machine is a metaphor for the French Revolution. Before we started building our machine we had to have a blueprint for the whole machine and have at least 10 actions representing metaphors on the revolution. This is where I believe my group did its best work because we had all 10 metaphors and actions drawn and written in one class. I believe my group did its best work here because everybody was pitching in ideas and really trying to make this machine detailed and knowledgeable. So once we had all our actions down I made a nice copy for Mr Harris. Here is our nice copy (keep in mind we made this in one class!):
This sadly was not enough for us to move onto building since we did not have enough detail in our actual machine so for the next 1 and a half classes we made detailed blueprints of how the engineering would work:
Finally we got approved by Mr Harris to start building and we were all really happy because building it was the most fun part!
Building a metaphor machine!
So now we started building our machine. We all brought in materials and started working away. The biggest challenge my group faced while making the machine was when an idea didn’t work cause we all found it discouraging but we always found a way to fix it. What my group did well was time management. Each class we would all use our time effectively making a big difference each class. One thing personally I was proud of was my creation for the ball to reach the top again beacuase I realized that we needed it done so I decided to create at home and I was really proud of my design. Here’s a video of it working:
So my group had finally finished the machine three days before the exhibition meaning we had time to refine each action and make it look pretty! I also made a video showing our progression through the weeks:
The night of the exhibition!
So the night of the exhibition arrived my group was dressed in fancy attire to showcase France’s posh lifestyle. I was wearing a red dress with a black blazer. Also in each exhibition we have to serve food to the audience so we decided to serve chocolate croissants and French flag sugar cookies:
At 5:30 we the door swung open and we were all nervous for how our first run of the machine would go. Luckily my groups machine was very successful and had only 4 failures out of I think 30 which is a very good percentage! Here’s a video of my group presenting to a public audience (sorry for the bad audio):
So finally the doors closed at 7:30 and everyone was relieved that we were done! We cleaned up our machine and reflected on what we learnt through this project!
What I learnt!
From this whole project I learned that revolutions have influenced our political, social, economic, and cultural worldview. I also learned how to be very time efficient and learned how to best help my group through this project!
That was my winter exhibition post! Make sure to check out more of my blog!!!!!!!!