April 11, 2009

Free movies for my students

Well, for ten of my students, anyway.

The local Staples has been carrying Flexplay DVDs for a year or so, and what started as a $4.99 "rental" is now down to $0.99 each. (As an aside, I miss the cent symbol on the keyboard. Used to be right there above the 2, I think, but it's been replaced by the @.)

In case you don't know the details about Flexplay, it's a company that offers rental DVDs that you don't have to return. The way it works is that you buy the DVD for whatever price (currently $0.99 at Staples, if I haven't mentioned.) The DVD comes in a cardboard sleeve, within which the DVD itself is sealed in a plastic envelope. Once the envelope is opened, a chemical on the weirdly red DVD begins to react with oxygen. After about forty-eight hours, the reaction has moved far enough along that the red DVD has turned purple/black, and the DVD player will no longer be able to read the data, hence, the movie is dead. Here's some more details about the process.

The idea came about a few years back when movie studios began to find that the preview discs they sent out to Oscar voters - before the movie was officially released on DVD - were beginning to show up for sale on ebay and other places. It's kind of a neat idea, and I appreciate that they acknowledge the recycling issue with just buying and then throwing away the DVDs all the time. Their recycling program's a little vague as they don't mention what # of plastic the DVDs are, but they do give a few other possibilities.

In class, recently, my honors chemistry students studied rates of reaction - how to speed up and how to slow down reactions through various factors. This sounded like a great chance to apply that knowledge, and the $0.99 price made it feasible for me. So I picked up ten movies - two for each of my classes, all PG-13 or lower - and am offering them to my students...with one condition. Anybody who takes a disc has to be willing to take part in a little experiment trying to adjust the rates of reaction. They'll have to watch the movie, then treat the disc in various ways, then try to play the movie a few more times over the next few days (every 12 hours or so if at all possible).

Simple enough, eh?

Well, if you're a current student of mine reading this blog, you get first choice. I'll let two people from each class take a movie, and I'll let the students choose which experiment they're going to try on that DVD disc.

Here are the movies I bought. If you're one of my current students, leave a comment or email me as to which movie you want - if, of course, you want to play along:
  • Charlotte's Web
  • Cloverfield
  • Invasion
  • The Love Guru
  • Drillbit Taylor
  • August Rush
  • Mythbusters
  • Te Golden Compass
  • The Kite Runner
  • No Reservations
The DVDs are pretty bare bones with no extras on them - at least the two I've watched have been.

4 comments:

ReJEcht said...

I've seen those before, and wondered if it was possible to take them and rip the movies on to a computer, which has a dubious legality about it. It'd probably be possible with the right software, but unlike the permanent possession of ripping a movie you own these are very fleeting discs...

Lee said...

Science is so cool. Well, sometimes.

david huynh said...

Dibs on Mythbusters. It's probably quite possible to pirate the disc within 48 hours.

PHSChemGuy said...

ReJecht...I'll check with Mr Huynh...he was trying to rip one to his computer, so I'll check.

Mr Huynh - any news on that front?

Science is always cool, Emily...ALWAYS