indignant villainous lemmings

So this weekend I remembered that I still needed to go to the Chem Annex and do my IVLs for my chem 103 class. Now, this building is really old. I suppose if you're a hardcore chemist, you must really not care about decor or the fact that your flaking paint looks like it's more than a few decades old. Plus, budgets must be somewhat low, so they can't replace the rusty lab tables, sinks, or the plumming that has been around for literally over a century.

In any case, I expected these so-called interactive video lessons to be on par with the rest of the place. When I first heard about these, I imagined having to mosey on upstairs to a dark room where they had one of those really ghetto old movie-reel projectors that one would find sitting in some elementary school falling apart. They would have the videos start like every ten minutes or some such like in museums with rows and rows of chairs facing a white-painted brick wall and you would have to sign in with an old lady with retro glasses from the sixties and scrawl your name on a dog-eared, crumpled piece of paper on a clipboard on a really high counter to record the fact that you actually came and watched the movie that you didn't want to see in the first place. How this is interactive, I dunno, but people tend to add on adjectives to make their whatevers sound interesting and/or mildly appealing.

But no, it wasn't like that. I'm not sure whether to be happy about that or not, but I'm pretty sure, grades aside, that it was a waste of time nonetheless. I headed upstairs to, not a dark room, but a poorly-lit room filled, not with rows of chairs, but a good number of really old computers. The desktops of these computers were not the most appealing either; they appeared to use something like eight-bit colors and the icons were pretty old and pixelated.

The actual lessons weren't all that better. Most of it was a large amount of clicking the "Continue" button. There were a number of times at which you had to enter in some information, such as converting celsius into fahrenheit or milligrams into grams. Not only were these tasks not terribly difficult, you could press a random wrong button and it would tell you the right answer. There were a couple times where you actually had to get it right on the first try because it counted down the number of ones you still had to get right before letting you finish the lesson; other than that, however, you didn't have to think before clicking onward. The content was fairly basic, which I suppose is okay for a first lesson, but I had already "learned" all of that in my chem 102 class, which only increased the triviality of these lessons.

On the plus side, there were a number of videos that featured really flashy reactions. Not that any of them were terribly memorable (well, IIRC, the Aluminium Bromide reaction was pretty cool and burning magnesium is always fun too). The really cool ones had lots of smoke and burning metal in beakers, or, as in one vid, on a plate that was sitting on a carpet square which got impressively stained.

I do, however, have five more of these before the semester is over. I would hope for them to get better, or at least have more vids of stuff exploding or some such, but that might be a bit too much to ask for.