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 Used to be right there above the 2, I think, but it's been replaced by the @.)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.