Crime Scene Detective

Using Science and Critical Thinking to Solve Crimes (Grades 5-8)

Karen K. Schulz

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000491432
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Pedagogía
• Sous-sujet: Educación general

Watch the excitement ripple through your classroom as students use their intellect to find out who committed the "crime" at your school. Enliven your students as they practice critical thinking skills. Students are often taught skills such as the scientific method, scientific research, critical thinking, making observations, analyzing facts, and drawing conclusions in isolation. Studying forensic science allows students to practice these skills and see theories put into practice by using circumstances that model real-life events, meanwhile letting students explore a variety of career options.This exciting unit includes:

• background information on forensics,
• exploration of careers in forensic science and law enforcement,
• a simulation involving a fire in the school library, and
• instructions for writing your own crime scene simulation.

To crack the case, students examine evidence left at the scene, interview suspects (staff members), and use critical thinking to connect all of the clues and eliminate suspects. Students will feel like real investigators with this true-to-life simulation.Let your students solve more mysteries with Mystery Disease, Mystery Science, Detective Club, and The Great Chocolate Caper.Grades 5-8

Crime Scene Simulation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003233954-8

The Case of the Blazing Books

Crime Scene Simulation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003233954-9

Overview

A crime scene simulation gives students the opportunity to practice the skills they have been studying up to this point. If you do not want to use this simulation, you may design a crime scene that is unique for your school. Instructions for writing your own simulation begin on page 76.

This section includes witness statements and story lines for a crime that involves a fire in a school library. Supporting materials such as forensic lab procedures, a suspect identification card, and a sample news article are also provided. Many of these materials can serve as examples for writing your own materials for your own simulation.

Roles

The Case of the Blazing Books was written for and used in a middle school with approximately 75 faculty and staff members. Over 45 people volunteered to participate. If you don't have enough staff to cover all the roles, you can limit the number of people who are suspects. You must, however, use the profile for suspect 1.

Roles for this simulation include suspects, witnesses who suspect others, character witnesses, and forensic lab technicians. This simulation has roles for six suspects and each suspect has several people who suspect him or her (witnesses), and several people who think he or she could never commit such a crime (character witnesses). You can use these sample stories as they are written, alter them, or create new ones to fit your specific situation. Try to choose staff from all grade levels along with the secretarial, library, and administrative staff. By drawing from the entire staff students will be required to interview almost every staff member in the school to find clues to solve the crime.

Motive

This simulation involves a fire that was started on purpose. Arson makes a great crime to simulate because there are seven possible motives to work with. The motives are:

• vanity - wanting to be the hero, save people, get public recognition
• crime concealment - hiding a theft or other crime
• juvenile - kids under the age of 16 setting a fire for kicks
• insurance fraud - for financial gain; often the case in a failing business
• pyromaniac - a person who enjoys setting fires
• civil disorder - burning down a church, government office, or abortion clinic
• revenge - burning down someone's house or business to get revenge

Introduce the motives with your students prior to beginning the simulation. See page 79 in the appendix for a fact sheet that may be made into a transparency.

Keeping the Secret

Don't tell anyone who the guilty person is! Only you and the guilty person should know the truth. It will sway witnesses' statements if they know who committed the crime and it is bound to get back to the students.

Recruiting Participants

Ask for volunteers from your faculty and staff to play the various roles. Your crime scene story lines will depend on how many volunteers you get to participate. Based on this number, determine how many suspects you will have. For each suspect you will have at least three people with collaborating stories pointing to the guilt of the suspect and two people to serve as character witnesses, claiming the suspect must certainly be innocent of the crime. Either delete suspects or forensic lab technicians to accommodate the number of staff who are willing to participate.

Fill out the chart on page 27 with the participants' names.

Prepare Materials

Duplicate the following materials and give them to the appropriate people:

For each witness

• the newspaper article - page 28
• witness role description - page 29
• witness information (this is different for each person)

For each suspect and the guilty person

• the newspaper article - page 28
• the suspect role description - page 30
• the suspect profile (this is different for each person)
• request for evidence samples - pages 31, 32, 33

Gather Evidence

Prior to setting up the crime scene, gather evidence from all identified suspects.

• Ask each suspect to complete an identification card (page 33). You may choose to just assign a blood type to each suspect. Take a picture with a digital camera and include it on the card. This identification will be kept on file in the fingerprint lab.
• Ask for a hair sample and tape it to a note card.
• Ask for each person to bring in a right-foot shoe. Photograph the bottom of the shoe, placing a ruler in the picture to determine an accurate scale. Print the picture and label it with the name of the person to whom it belongs. You will be leaving prints behind at the scene for the guilty person, so make sure you "stamp" the shoe of the guilty person before returning it. (See Setting Up the Scene, page 23-24.)
• Get a handwriting sample from each suspect for a note that is found at the scene. Use page 32. For the guilty person, have her write the grocery list on a plain piece of paper as well as on a copy of page 32. On the plain paper, she should only write the grocery items, not her name.
• You will need to get two samples of prints, hair and handwriting from the guilty party. One set will be left at the crime scene while the second set will be placed in the lab.

Set Up the Labs

The number of labs you establish will depend on the number of volunteers you have. You may keep all of the evidence in one location or in a couple of rooms. It is best to have at least two different locations so that more students can view evidence at the same time with less congestion. For example, the students may view fingerprints and footprints in the same lab but go to another location to view handwriting and hair samples. Post a sign outside the door identifying the location as a forensic lab.

This simulation uses six labs – a fire report, blood, handwriting, hair, shoe print, and fingerprints. Although the evidence may all be viewed in the same lab, you will need to set up a separate file for each type of evidence.

On the outside of each file folder write the type of evidence (fingerprints, shoe print, etc.). In the folder place the official report for that specific piece of evidence and any physical evidence recovered from the scene of the crime. In separate envelopes keep all the suspects' evidence samples using a different envelope for each type of evidence. Label each envelope with the type of evidence it contains. For example, the envelope labeled "Fingerprints" will contain all of the suspects' fingerprint samples. This envelope and its contents will always remain in the possession of the lab attendant. By organizing evidence this way, the lab technician can hand the students the information recovered from the crime scene (the file folder) without showing them all of the suspects' evidence samples. At the time they visit the lab, detectives may not know who all of the suspects are, so you don't want them to see all of the suspects' evidence. The lab technician will just give the students the evidence sample from the suspect they've requested.

When arriving at the lab students will need to fill in the Forensic Lab Log (page 67). Make several copies of the log sheet and staple them to the inside of a folder. You should have one folder per lab. This log documents that the students have handled the evidence in questio...