Summer SAVY 2019: Session 1, Day 2 – Forensic Science (Rising 1st/2nd)
Dear parents:
Day two turned out to be even better than day one! Listen in on some comments from our crime scene detective team after viewing our crime scene this morning. “Oh look, there are two more spilled cups with liquid in them!” “The liquid looks like oil in one and soda in another.” “The spilled water is still there!” “The things on the desk have been moved!” “The pen in the pad of paper has been moved.” “Someone was in the room!.”
Teacher: “Did any of you come back last night?”
Students: “Noooooo!” “I was too tired to come back last night, commented one student!”
Teacher: “Were you here last night, Miss Ashanti?”
Ashanti: “No.”
Teacher: “I wasn’t here either, so who do you think was here?”
Students: (all together), “The person who stole the computer!”
Then, we learned some new information about our suspects so we whipped out our crime files. I shared with the students that I found out what each suspect’s favorite drinks were, through stealthy means, and we wrote them in our suspect files. Oh, boy, did our detectives explode with revised realizations. Students said, that wasn’t oil in the cup, it was sweet tea, so that must mean Miss Sarah was at the crime scene because her favorite drink is sweet tea, and Miss Mills must have been at the crime scene and that other new liquid was lemonade, and that is her favorite drink! Then the students thought that there are three main suspects now because Mrs. Templeton’s favorite drink is water and hers was the first cup we found at the crime scene. We discussed our hunches and polled what each detective thought and so far, Mrs. Templeton has the most votes for “guilty”, but as we know, we need more scientific evidence to narrow our suspects down to the actual criminal!
We then learned another technique that forensic scientists use to uncover unknown liquid substances at the crime scene, so we discussed looking at physical characteristics as well as chemical evidence using litmus paper. Off we went in teams using our pipettes, data chart, litmus strips and 8 different liquids (coffee, milk, Coke, Sprite, sweet tea, lemonade, orange juice, water). These items were labeled but we still had to determine physical characteristics and whether the liquids were possibly acids or bases. Our team carefully evaluated the liquids as an ace crime scene team!
Our knowledge of what relationships are and how the scientific method has a relationship with forensic science, crime solving. We came up with a multiple of ways that the scientific method and crime solving have an important relationship. A few students came up with words to describe this relationship, as unity, connected, and a community. Our key concept for this course is relationships and our overarching question is: Explain how the process of gathering and analyzing information in various forensic fields is used to present science-based evidence so that the relationship between suspects and crime can be verified.
Students have another fun home project for tonight if you have the time. This one is called, Mystery Box. I can’t wait to see how much closer our detectives get to cracking the case of the missing computer, tomorrow!
Sincerely,
Karen Tyson
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