Crime Scene Lab lesson plans
Each one is a class period with everything to run it: a teacher plan, a student worksheet, an exit ticket with answers, and the standards it meets. Students need no account, and a free class saves their work.
Crime Scene Lab: The Trophy Case, a Crime Scene in One Period
Students open a virtual crime scene, a broken trophy case with a trail of drops to the door and a note on the desk, and process it the way a forensics class processes a scene: the whole room photographed first in the dark, then each surface closer, then close-ups with the scale; a numbered marker beside each thing before it is picked up; gloves on; wet evidence in paper. They powder the pane, lift a print and send it to the lab. The app keeps the chain of custody and a log of every mistake, and the worksheet asks them to read it back.
FreeCrime Scene Lab: Fingerprints, Classify, Compare, Call It
Two prints have already been lifted from the broken pane and sent to the lab. Students classify each by counting its deltas, mark the ridge features they can see, pick a suspect and a finger, find the same features on the card and pair them, and make the call in the words an examiner uses. One lift is clean; the other is small and smudged, and it may never give enough. Then they write the classifier as three rules and run it on a whole card to see where it breaks.
FreeCrime Scene Lab: Blood Drops and the Angle of Impact
Eight stains on the floor of a virtual crime scene already have their close-up with the scale. Students measure each stain's width and length with a caliper, build the formula for the angle of impact from chips, asin(width / length), and read the working. They drag strings along the drops by the trophy case and watch them cross where the drops came from, then use the angles and the distance to estimate the height of the hand. The round drops fell straight down; the trail to the door came from a hand on the move.