Don’t forget to hit record
Forum/Announcements/Welcome to week 5
Greetings, everyone, and welcome to week 5! Yes, it’s the moment I know you’ve all been waiting for: the first week of lab work! I know from my messages that some of you have been having some concerns, and if that’s you, don’t worry, you’re definitely not alone. But everything you’ve done so far this year has prepared you for this, so I don’t want to hear that anyone bails on the first experiment. That includes you, UTC+12! Just because you’re going early doesn’t mean I don’t have my eye on you.
Now, as you know, we don’t believe in making things easy – just because you’re students doesn’t mean you can’t do real science, and we are training the next global generation of scientists to tackle the big problems we’re facing. We are going to start you off this week with one of the most challenging experiments you might ever encounter. You will have support from your lab-nets and the TAs in your ‘zones can port in if needed, but it’s up to each one of you to make sure you are prepared for this, and to complete it within the week. I don’t care if you have to start over three times – and it has happened – I expect you to get it done. As you’ll see in the lab notes, grinding up the reactants and cleaning them in a glovebox takes about five hours, so cancel your other plans this week – you might end up spending several days on this if it doesn’t go right the first time.
If you’ve upgraded your goggles over the weekend you should find the guide-sims are ready to get you started, and the immersi-notes from the last three lectures are in there as well. Remember to set your gloves to extra-fine because you need to be extremely accurate with the powders. If everything goes well, you’re going to learn more about chemical reactivity than you could ever find out from watching or reading. If not, well, there are few different ways things can explode, but you’ll figure it out.
Good luck, and remember to hit record before you start – we’ll make a blooper reel to show at the end of term bash, like we always do, and it’s always a lot of fun to revisit this one.
Ciao! Prof Y.
Links
The universal university (scenario)
Next scenario (Extreme unbundling)
Higher Education Futures (project page)
