The following (emails) were written by members of the Forensic and Investigative Science during the second session of the program. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.
Today was a blast. We learned about "dead bodies" (gross, grosss, gross) and we made a Stella diagram of them. It was cool to see how long it took for each of the bodies to decompose. Then we had to solve a mystery, "Who stole the cookies." We had to collect data based from the crime scene. We then collaborated efforts to convict the criminal(s). We had a great time doing this. We wrapped up the class with an investigation of the Romanov family. We enjoyed this also. Unfortunately, the class has ended today. I hope that Shodor will have some more fun classes such as this.
Monte and Aimee
My thoughts about today where that it was very mind challenging but yet fun. We larned to disipher difrerent ink samples, glass samples, and we also had two activities that which one was dealing with the decomposition of a human body and the other was solving a mystery which involved the whole classes participation.
I had even more fun today than I did yesterday. We started off the day with an ink chromotography analysis wich turned out well. We then used stella to model the decomposition of dead bodies which was really neat because we could see how much different variables affect the rate of decay. The part I really enjoyed was the crime scene that we investigated. We used all the things we had learned to take apart the evidence. I enjoyed myself very much. Wendy is an excellent teacher and her TA's were also very helpful.
Nigel