Parts of Heritage Woods secondary and Bert Flinn Park were closed off with police tape Thursday, May 31 as Grade 12 biology and law students investigated their first accident and homicide cases.
And while Port Moody police and a Tri-City News photographer showed up for the action, rest assured there was nothing dangerous taking place at the Port Moody secondary school.
In fact, the students were practicing the techniques of crime scene investigation they learned in class by solving several mysterious deaths.
“We’re setting it up to make it look believable but there will be a trick — a red herring,” said Farna Naemi, who will attend Douglas College in the fall for an eventual career as a teacher.
The crime scene investigation project was a collaboration between law teacher Mike Tyldesley and biology teacher Anthony Ciardullo, who wanted their students to learn new skills in addition to the basic facts of law and science.
“It’s allowing the kids to develop some skills and knowledge and having them apply their knowledge and then presenting their results afterwards,” said Tyldesley who has a taught for 25 years.
He said the trend in education is for students to do more critical thinking, analysis and presentation and the crime scene investigation project allows them to hone their skills in those areas.
“I used to teach to the exam,” Tyldesley said, “but for my subject area, I don’t think exams are the way to go, it’s more like developing skills, such as public speaking, and to be able critically analyze.”
And for biology students, the program was fun because the teenagers got to apply their knowledge about DNA and entomology, the study of insects, to do a forensic analysis.“It’s a way to test out a potential career,” said Ryan Kwok, who will be studying science at UBC this fall.
Before they set up their crime scene, the students heard from a coroner about crime scene analysis, conducted research, assigned roles, and established a storyline for the type of death they were responsible for. The categories were premeditated murder, manslaughter, accident and death by natural cause.
On Thursday, they set up their crime scene, acted as witnesses and also investigated another group’s death.
“They have to keep it secret, the other group will have to determine what happened,” Tyldesley said.
The students seemed to enjoy the opportunity to work on a project that contained so many interesting facets and required skills other than book learning to arrive at an answer.
“It’s cool for us to get the real sense of how complicated it [crime scene investigation] is,” said Jenna Querengesser, who will attend SFU in the fall for an eventual career in law. “Now we get to see everything that goes into it.”
