I recently purchased a Chromebook to experiment with. It’s been a lot of fun seeing what I can make this thing do without changing it too much (I know one can go into developer mode and even put Windows 11 on it, but then there wouldn’t be much point having a Chromebook to begin with). I’ve managed to get Windows 3.11 running in dosbox running in the Crostini linux environment running in ChromeOS.
I recently thought it would be fun to look through some old teaching resources, which I’ve not used for a while because they use Flash. Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2019. Before the announcement that it would be discontinued, much of the interactivity online was served by Flash. At the time of writing, HTML5 seems to have taken over.
In order to get flash animations to work, I installed an android app called SWF Player Pro. I paid for it because I didn’t want adverts. SWF Player Pro uses Ruffle to play interactive flash files. The flash files I wanted to use were embedded in the old Boardworks PowerPoint presentations.
It turns out, if you save the .ppt presentation as a .pptx file, rename the extension .zip, extract the .bin files from the ActiveX directory, then use JPEXS Free Flash Decompiler (which I installed on the Chromebook using a .deb package), you can extract the .swf flash files. It’s a bit of a faff, but at least I can now use them. But…
Oh dear. There was this one, which I reported on a few days ago.
There was this one, where they’ve got the antimatter arrow the wrong way around in the Feynman diagram (and the W-boson is not diagonal enough for my taste).
There are references to electrical energy; a term used the outdated ‘energy transformation’ model (not the ‘energy transfer’ model currently taught and, more importantly, currently examined. I think that topic deserves a blog post of its own)
And it’s not just Boardworks. There are resources from BrainPop that talk about creating heat energy by molecular movement (I put subtitles on so you can see what was said).
Not good. It is easy to criticise others’ resources, but much harder to write resources yourself, and even harder still to write resources that are perfect, so perhaps I should not be so harsh. The resources are still useful for teaching and I can use the little mistakes as learning opportunities in lessons.
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