New project time: Lord Vetinari's Clock.
"It went tick-tock like any other clock. But somehow, and against all usual horological practice the tick and the tock were irregular. Tick tock tick... and then the merest fraction of a second longer before ... tock tick tock... and then a tick a fraction of a second earlier than the mind's ear was now prepared for. The effect was enough, after ten minutes, to reduce the thinking processes of even the best-prepared to a sort of porridge."
I may go a little beyond that. You know how just sometimes when you glance at a clock you catch it ticking backwards for a split second before carrying on? (Apparently a known psychological glitch, glad it's not just me), well I want this to actually do that. And maybe skip 10 seconds here and there. Possibly avoid prime numbers for a minute, that kind of thing. But always stay, on average, in time to the nearest 30 seconds or so. And have a nice loud tick. Arduino & stepper motor time I think.
We have a spare "standard issue" clock at work, same in all of the classrooms, so if I build it into that I can swap it out for the teachers who I suspect can take a joke...?
(Although maybe not, a certain subset of students may genuinely find it distressing...maybe just some of the non-teaching staff...)
Another similar thing you could do: remake one of the clocks to be its mirror image (preferably one in the science classroom, to underscore the hardness of describing rotation directions).
Yes. (Well, with the face mirrored but numbers not mirrored, I guess.)
@robryk Almost seems rude not to mirror the numbers!
:)
On one hand, mirroring the numbers makes the whole thing appear "unnatural" as opposed to causing people to realize that there's nothing natural in the normal one.
On the other hand, if someone already realized that the normal one is just as natural as the other one, mirrored numbers make them notice that letters actually have orientation.
My university's association of student mathematicians had such a clock, and some people would bring it and replace the lecture hall clock before the linear algebra lecture that would introduce the concept of orientation.
@robryk As in it runs anti-clockwise, with a mirror image face?