Queens Tribune
 
....October 9, 12:23 PM
 
 
 
CSI: Curious Student Investigators

Using a microscope to investigate, students from John Bowne High School play detective.
By Joseph Orovic

The fledgling forensic team gathered around the crime scene. Still new to all of this, they hadn’t even delegated duties.

“Where’s the flashlight?” one member said.

“Come here! Measure this!” another shouted.

“What is that?”

A plane hijacker bailed out of a wayward aircraft by parachute and landed in a wooded area of Long Island. Investigators were able to pinpoint his location to a five mile radius. Who the hijacker was and what happened to him after landing was unknown. The forensic team was sent to his landing spot to find out.

And so they circled the scene – a faux three-foot Christmas tree standing atop a thin layer of dirt in an inflatable kiddie pool, sprinkled with numbered yellow tags of physical evidence.

The team kept probing. Snapped pictures. Gathered clues and analyzed them. Took notes, assembled DNA data and handwriting evidence. In the end, the team presented its findings to the higher-ups in the hopes of locating the fugitive.

Don’t panic. It was all a school exercise. The team was made up of students from Flushing’s John Bowne High School.

The New York Hall of Science staged the dramatics to launch the Crime Scene Information Technology (CSIT) initiative. The program takes the sexy topic of forensic science, popularized by shows like “CSI,” and applies it to the classroom. The goal is to foster a genuine curiosity for the natural sciences, with the added benefit of actually learning something in school.

Geared towards middle to high school students, CSIT works in conjunction with school teachers, handing out mobile labs made up of laptops with database access, digital cameras and scientific instruments. Each lab involves different crimes with students using the provided tools and their brains to find the culprit.

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The team of juniors and seniors began their search at a faux crime scene.

The initiative offers a leap in active learning, which is now popular with many educators. Hands-on problems modeling real-life scenarios tend to engage students more, which helps young minds retain more than a lecture.

For educators like Faye Melas, who teaches the Forensic Science elective at John Bowne and holds a doctorate in petroleum ecology, the labs fill many needs.

“I didn’t know how chock full of science these labs would be,” she said adding, “The students got so motivated and engaged.”

Herself a CSI fan, Melas began John Bowne’s Forensic Science class five years ago, after looking up the scientific jargon the show uses endlessly. Now, she said about half of her class goes on to pursue careers as forensic scientists at John Jay College.

The event began with a downer. The students were subjected to a talk by renowned forensic scientist Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, who berated them with reminders of how unglamorous the field was.

“You have to work hard,” was his mantra.

Dr. Kobilinsky used the OJ Simpson case as a prime example of how far the field has come. He caused a stir when his slideshow moved to the actual dead bodies of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, the gaping mortal wounds in their necks in full view. The blood and guts of the field were quite literally on display – and that was the point.

“It’s vital students have an idea of what they’re getting into,” he said after the presentation. “You need the kids to start getting their minds in science early, because at some point, it’s too late.”

At the mock mystery, students unknowingly delved right into science. But to them, it was more a game of Clue. Clipboard in hand, John Bowne’s investigative team walked away with a list of evidence: two pieces of cloth; a parachute’s string; a 12-inch shoe print; a finger print and a strand of hair. Armed with a list of questions, they moved on to the DNA lab, where they compared handwriting and DNA evidence.

“I definitely wanted this in school,” John Bowne senior Dorothy Gyampoh said while her teammates bustled about with evidence. Though she was having fun, she wasn’t exactly sure what she was learning – which was the whole point.