你好 and welcome to todays blog post.

I honestly can’t believe we have already done the Winter Exhibition. It feels like we just got back from Loon Lake! (We kind of did)

This semester in humanities was all about revolutions, but our overall project was so much more than learning about one revolution. It was fun, challenging, and took me out of my comfort zone. We had to create a Rube Goldberg machine, one of those crazy contraptions that perform simple tasks with a ton of unnecessary steps. But here’s the twist – each step of our machine had to represent an event from our assigned revolution.

To start this project off, we read Animal Farm by George Orwell. I enjoyed this book, and I think it was a good way to start off the revolution project. Once we finished the book, we got split into groups based on our revolution rankings. I ended up in a group of 7 people (including myself) we were the Xinhai Revolution. One way I challenged myself as a learner, is going with the flow. I was originally put in the Russian Revolution, which I was stoked about, but the teacher asked me to move to the Xinhai Group. I was slightly unsure at the time, but I said yes, because I like to challenge myself. So going into the Xinhai group, not knowing anything about it was probably a good thing.

Now I want to tell you all about the Xinhai Revolution…

To understand our revolutions more, we made infographics. I used an app called Canva, which made my infographic match the theme. It covered the four main stages of the revolution, plus a quick overview and timeline.

Check out my final infographic:

Like all my learning, I went through drafts. Here are all of my drafts from the infographic process:

In order to gather information for my infographic, I had to research. Thankfully our teachers supplied each group with good sources to help us gain more information about our revolution. I really recommend this video if you are wanting to learn more about the Xinhai Revolution.

Now that I’m a Xinhai Revolution expert, we started gearing up for the exhibition. Before diving into building our metaphor machines, we brainstormed individual ideas for our machine connections. My contribution to our final machine was the see saw. It represented the in equality that happened when the government gave the railway job to the group with more power and took it away from the local groups. This event is important because it is one of the main reasons for sparking the 14 provinces against the Qing Government.

Once we all had our ideas, we merged them all together to create the final blue print.

As we began building, our teachers told us to make a burn down chart. This helped each group to brake down the things they needed to do and when they needed to be done. This also allowed us to see what we have done and completed. Our initial goal was to have one step done every day or so, until the exhibition. Each group member had a job. So while some of us started to build, others started on the documentary.

My assigned job for the documentary was script writer and narrator. Although, my group wanted to give our documentary an interesting twist. We did it Kardashian style. Which was definitely an interesting script writing experience.

We faced plenty of ups and downs during the design process. We had some aesthetic problems that we could have planned better before starting to build. We faced a lot of trial and error, but that’s what helped us grow as a group of learners. My group was great at never giving up, as many times as our machine did fail, we just kept persevering. I unfortuanelty left my group to finish the rest of the building and final touches, because I was off to Australia. They all did a great job when I left to make it even more cohesive and aestheticly pleasing. Overall I think my group worked very well together, we helped one another out, and provided ideas.

 

Sure, it got tough and stressful at times, but in the end, it was a valuable learning experience. My big takeaways? Don’t give up, be patient, and being a Kardashian is quite exhausting.

And to answer the big question – “How do ideas drive change?” Well, one of our learning steps in this project was getting a good understanding of the word “metaphor.” I have decided to answer the driving question sort of as a metaphor.

Ideas are like seeds that grow into big changes. When people have new thoughts or ways of doing things, it can lead to important shifts in how we live and work. Imagine someone comes up with a better way to grow crops or a new gadget that makes life easier. These ideas can spread, and soon many people start using them. That’s how ideas drive change—they spark new ways of thinking and doing stuff. It’s not always about big inventions; even small, simple ideas can add up and make a difference. So, when people share and act on ideas, they can shape the world around them for the better, or for the worse.

Thanks for joining my revolution of learning!