IMSA Excellence 2000+ Curriculum

Learning Summary
There are two pieces of evidence containing fingerprints. As a preliminary activity, Fingerprints: Are There Enough to go Around? introduces students to the fingerprint classifications and has students mathematically explore the notion of fingerprint uniqueness.

Learning Objectives
The students will:

• be introduced to fingerprint categories and subcategories;
• think about classifying similar objects based on their physical characteristics;
• explore a mathematical counting problem, and calculate how many unique sets of fingerprints are possible given the number of subcategories; and,
• think about the specific assumptions that enter into such a calculation.