Meet our Junior CSIs: Audrey, Rachel, Jared, Aaron & Anthony (L-R)
Audrey and her schoolmates had an extra day of holiday today to celebrate the school’s 2010 PSLE and ‘O’ Level results. We decided, together with our friend Pei Hua, to bring the kids to the CSI exhibition at the Singapore Science Centre. As fans of the CSI TV series, we were pretty excited to see what was in store!
As we entered the exhibition, we were handed clipboards with our assignments. We were Level 1 CSIs, with our own unique Agent IDs. Our CSI experience started with a briefing from none other than Gil Grissom himself (via video!). We received instructions and a run-down of what to expect.
We would be investigating 3 cases. Case 1 was a car that crashed through a house; Case 2 was a dead woman in an alley; and Case 3 was a human skeleton found in the desert. The forms on the clipboard (pic on left) served as guides to help us with the investigations. Each case had its own task list and lab work to complete.
It followed a fairly straightforward process. Like every CSI episode, we started with a close scrutin of the crime scene. The case forms have a basic diagram of the crime scene and it was our job to observe and jot down notes of what we saw.
When this was done, just like on TV, we headed to the lab. There were various lab stations, covering ballistics, blood splatter analysis, toxicology, forensics, fingerprinting and so on. We got to look through microscopes, check out real bullets and analyse DNA, tyre striation marks etc.
The exhibition had informative videos featuring CSIs from the TV series as well real-life CSIs. We continued to make notes on our forms as we examined the evidence and uncovered the identities of the victim and the suspects. The final stage was the autopsy by Dr. Robbins - he gave a concise summary of the injuries and cause of death for each case. With that, we completed our reports and got ready to hand them to Supervisor Grissom!
At the end of the entire experience, we received our CSI diplomas - signed by Grissom of course!
Overall, the CSI Experience was entertaining – good fun for an outing with the kids. As it targets a broad range of participants including younger school kids, most of the information was presented in a rather simplified manner and did not require much actual analysis to arrive at the correct answers. It would have been much more interesting for adults and older kids to have had at least one case that was challenging to work on. The crime scenes, while generally well thought through and assembled, were not quite as realistic as some of us who are used to the TV series would have expected or liked. For example, the dead bodies were obviously cloth dummies - we guessed this was probably needed so as to not scare off the kids!
After all, it was Grissom who said: “Amazing how the sight of blood can clear a room.” …The organisers wouldn’t have wanted that scenario for sure!
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