Everybody loves the idea of a good mock crime scene. To be honest, as soon as I heard I would be teaching a forensic science class, my imagination had been running wild about how I was going to run the crime scene.  I wanted to scaffold the rest of the semester off of the evidence they collected there to emphasize how important it is to do it correctly; I wanted the scene to spark their imagination and pique their interest. I wanted it to be tough enough to make them show they had been paying attention, with enough red herring stuff that they couldn’t really collect all of it (spoiler: they still did).

As I set up the scene on Tuesday night, I worried that the students would be disappointed that it wasn’t as complex as a real crime scene, that it wasn’t bloody enough, that there wasn’t a lot of random purplish lighting and dark shadows everywhere like in CSI.  I worried that I wasn’t giving them enough space or that it was silly to do it indoors, after hearing one student tell another that of course we’d be doing it outdoors (mental note for next time).

Then the kids walked in and sounded awestruck.  Awesome!  Nailed it!  Score one for me!  Then various faculty and staff started coming in and messing with their crime scenes, and the students all but tackled them to get them out of the scenes (thank you to everyone who came!). Then the students started working it, and did okay.  There were definitely some things that didn’t get absorbed in class, like why we package things certain ways (so that Mario can’t just reach into the bag and steal your evidence), or that they need to change gloves as though you are touching blood every time you touch something. But they definitely showed grasp of the major stuff, like documenting stuff before you move it, and there was some great critical thinking about what evidence would be useful and what wouldn’t.