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forensics 2016
Shodor > SUCCEED > Workshops > Archive > forensics 2016

Today the students received their evidence notebooks. Next, they talked about what forensics was. Then everyone introduced themselves and then they proceeded to talk about the roots of forensics. After this, they did the first activity in which they observed a picture for 30 seconds and relayed the details back to the instructors and tried to get as many details a possible. They did it very well. Next, they did another observation activity. Instead of relaying the information back to the instructors, they tried to describe the picture to several “investigators” who then tried to take in all the details and explain exactly what the picture looked like without seeing it. The investigators had a hard time depicting the scene accurately. However, this was the point. We wanted the students to realize that witness testimonies are not reliable. Next they played a game with Legos where they built a structure then the other students tried to build the exact Lego structure by communicating through a middleman. The second structure was harder to copy but they got very close. Then the teams swapped who built the structure and who copied it. Next they talked about the scientific method. After break, the cookies were missing with only a coded note left to figure out who took them. They wrote down a list of suspects and they also suspected that the two instructors running the class stole the cookies. After the speculation settled down, they started talking about cryptography so that they could decode the message. Then they learned about several different types of cyphers: shift and Caesar cyphers. After this they decoded the cookie note using a shift cypher. At the end of class the students learned how to do reflections and wrote about their day.