August 8, 2005

Matt Lathrop started out the class today by helping the students get to know each other. They all filled out a questionnaire about themselves and then the papers were passed out to other students. Everyone had to find out whose paper they had by asking the questions on the page. They came back together and introduced the person they had found. Next, Bob2 came in and talked with class about apprenticeships at Shodor. He let them know that if they really enjoyed the workshop then they could come back to Shodor and get paid to learn!

When Bob2 was finished, Matt gave a brief talk about Forensic Science and the different professions within it. For their first activity the class was shown a picture for 30 seconds and then told to answer questions about it. They all did a good job, but found a few discrepancies between their answers. Next they took turns acting as investigators. One group would leave the room while the rest of the class observed another picture. When the investigators came back in they had to question their classmates to determine what they had seen.

A test of their deductive and problem solving skills followed. Matt gave them a mystery in which someone had destroyed a sweater. Using pieces of information gathered from the suspects they had to solve the crime. After working through the case the students wrote out their solutions on the board and presented them to rest of the class. This gave everyone the opportunity to see the different styles of problem solving employed by the different groups.

For the day's final activity they worked with code breaking. Using Decode de Code students got practice decrypting encoded messages.