IMSA Excellence 2000+ Curriculum

Learning Summary
Two sets of shoe prints and a tire impression were found outside the broken window at the back of the school. In the lesson, Crime Scene Shoe Prints, students are challenged to think about what kinds of information might be contained in the images of the shoe prints, how to uncover that information, and how they might link each print to a specific person. Four activities are included to help students with their challenge. In these activities, students can determine the brand and make (style) of each shoe, determine the shoe size, infer the age (i.e. the amount of wearing) of each shoe, and attempt to infer the height of each shoe owner.

Learning Objectives
 The students will:

• make meticulous observations of an image in order to infer various physical characteristics of the original object;
• experience consensus-building in a manner similar to that used by scientists;
• use the graphing of real data to explore the concepts of measurement uncertainty, scale conversions and correlation; and,
• identify their assumptions, and decide what further information they need in order to link the evidence to a specific person(s).