Forensics
By Ms. Shirley Hui

Did you ever wonder how investigators solve crimes?  Do you enjoy watching episodes of CSI?  Well, this course is for students who love solving mysteries.

Each session will provide students an opportunity to build investigative skills and think like a crime scene investigator.  Student-sleuths will analyze physical evidence and debate possible hypotheses.  This course introduces comprehensive activities that allow students to utilize skills and tools they’ve developed during previous sessions.   

Students will learn how to use evidence to reconstruct a crime scene.  Through various lab experiments, students learn to analyze blood splatter, fibers, finger prints, hand-writing and mystery powders – just to name a few. 

Through simulated crime scenes, students will examine evidence, experiment with different testing techniques, reconstruct the activities of the perpetrator, and expand their powers of deduction to solve crimes.

Students take active roles as characters in the mystery, “The Missing Computer Chip.”  In order to uncover the criminal perpetrator, students practice interviewing and recording statements from each of the characters involved.  By using the process of elimination, the perpetrator is revealed.   

In “The Mystery of Lyndon’s Locker,” students will be transformed into chemists to study the properties and reactive qualities of substances retrieved from the locker of the school’s star quarterback.  Could this substance be drugs?  Or is it just leftovers from a science project?  The information learned from the lab results about the mystery powder could determine Lyndon’s future.

If mysteries have always intrigued you, and you would rather be actively solving them than just reading about them, then this introductory forensics course is perfect for you. 
 

Ms. Shirley Hui
Science Faculty
Cedar Drive School, Colts Neck

Ms. Shirley Hui is a science teacher at Cedar Drive Middle School in Colts Neck, NJ.  After teaching physical and life sciences to the 6th and 7th grade in New York City public schools for over 7 years, Ms. Hui joined the staff at Cedar Drive in 2005.  Ms. Hui holds a  B.S. in Education from the City University of New York at Brooklyn College with a concentration in science.  She was awarded Graduate Honors in her Masters degree in the Elementary Science and Environmental Program from Brooklyn College.  Ms. Hui believes in a "hands-on" approach to learning and knows the importance of helping her students make connections between science and their every day lives.

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