A dastardly X-ray puzzle....

[X-ray]

I am trying to bring back some excitement in the students' lives. I've been giving them little challenges here and there and some rewards, but now I want to do something special. I want to give them an unusual puzzle to solve (it has to involve the skilful use of an X-ray machine). This is one of the things I have been thinking about doing:

I can make a wooden box with a set of ramps and contacts inside. There will be a steel ball inside, and depending on the tilt of the box this ball could close some circuits or be trapped in a compartment. I can mask some of the compartments with lead strips and then give the students the sealed unit to X-ray in order to figure out which way to tilt it to achieve a certain objective. I could mount this box on a jig that allows for precise lifting of the box per corner.

Do you dudes and dudettes have any other ideas for a most cunning and dastardly puzzle, something that involves a bit of noggin and X-ray imaging to solve? I was also thinking of raising the stakes: maybe I could rig a wire to the student and if they tilt that box wrong and the ball makes a fatal contact, the student can get a mild (or somewhat mild) electric shock  :evilgrin:

There will of course be suitable prizes, paid for by the qualified radiographers...but I want this to be quite a challenge.

[X-ray]

he he

Even if I went along with that, it would be far too easy for them.

[X-ray]

"...Okay, they've got to guess the exact currency denomination and the year of minting..."
---------------------------------------------------


 :lol:

Actually, I would be the big loser in that contest because these guys and girls are keen and would probably demand that I crap through a mesh to prove what coin it was. They know me to be dastardly and wouldn't put it past me to swallow a South African coin and not say anything about non-British currency being used.

Nah, people can't be X-rayed for the sake of a puzzle. I need an inanimate puzzle that I can reproduce for at least three sets of students exactly. I'm not swallowing anything and I'm not letting the students X-ray ME, no sir...

[X-ray]

That's more along the lines of what I want to do. Yup, I will design something with a few pipes and maybe a couple of radio-opaque grates that can be pulled with a string. I'll put a time limit on this. Instead of electric shocks maybe the winner can make the slowest competitor a hat of his/her choice. Could be a dunce cap or a Dr Seuss hat. That'll put some energy into the competition and then at least I don't get accused of molesting students :-)

[X-ray]

"I hope you work in a private hospital, and you are not wasting my taxes on sillyness"
------------------------------------------------------

Nah, I am always careful to use MY tax contributions in these endeavours. YOURS get spent giving radical clerics free heart operations    :-P

[X-ray]

@ metalman

Well, many of us regard the cardiologists as swines themselves  :lol:
But no, my reference is to a scheduled angioplasty, hasn't been done yet, but the NHS is due to pay for it if the cleric comes back from holiday. It is a minimally-invasive procedure.
But anyway that is another matter. The gist of my post to mdma is that there are indeed questionable expenditures on the NHS, but teaching students via creative means is not one of these. In fact if I total up my contributions (in terms of unpaid tasks, research, lectures etc) they far outweigh the trivial expense of using a few X-ray films to teach the students techniques that can be applied to live forensic cases later. Hell, I even paid the department for a box of 100 films and I am only going to use about 70 of those, so I feel an X-ray party gonna happen with the other 30  :-D

[X-ray]

@ metalman

Yup, I also want them to be able to improvise and adapt their technique to a non-standard condition. Since we aren't allowed to X-ray people (even volunteers) and we don't get cadavers or whole-body phantoms, I have to come up with something from scratch. Otherwise they just observe us with real patients and if they X-ray somebody, they usually have to hand over to us if something non-standard happens.

radiocative stuff: not our bag really. It would fog our films. We do X-rays to locate radiotherapy 'seeds' such as prostatic brachytherapy but that's a very carefully-controlled source. We don't deal with anything that isn't enclosed in a lead carrier or embedded in the patient. Our radiation is strictly electromagnetic.

[X-ray]

That's dangerous stuff there! The radiotherapy department has some Cobalt 60 units and a linear accelerator, but these are fixed units built into lead 'bunkers'. The mobile stuff is scary. A mate of mine was doing industrial radiography and he had to carry a mobile unit through some pipes at a refinery, to X-ray the welds for defects. He stopped doing that job when he learned that a colleague had found a defective unit had 'lost its source'  :-o

Nah, I'll stick to the more friendly radiation, thank you.

[X-ray]

50 pennies  :-o
You and PMC trying to kill me or what?  :inquisitive:

Mind you, we have had our share of X-raying people who have ingested or otherwise 'concealed' items. Each radiographer has a mental list of their Top Five. Here's mine (all genuine):

1) Young man swallowed 27 scalpel blades.
2) Old fellow swallowed a large serving spoon
3) An enterprising guy managed to feed the curly cord between a telephone handset and the telephone base, into his bladder.
4) Young woman 'hid' a light bulb
5) Fellow 'hid' a fluorescent tube

As tempting as the pennies sound, I ain't going into anybody's Top Five  ;-)