Papillion La Vista High students participate in mock crime scene to identify substances
Papillion La Vista High School Honors Physical Science teacher Kristen Lebeda-Svehla dressed her classroom up to look like a mock crime scene in an effort to get her students interested in a chemistry unit about identifying substances.
"The students are CSI investigators and they are investigating properties of substances and then they are going to compare them to the crime scene substances and figure out what happened," Lebeda-Svehla explained.
Once the students have figured out what may have happened, they will then write a news story about what they believe unfolded at the “crime scene.”
Lebeda-Svehla's class usually does a lab where her students have to identify substances, but this year she decided to take it a step further to spice up the lesson by adding the crime scene.
"Being able to compare the substances is more like a real life job that maybe someone in our chemistry unit might want to pursue," she said.
The students were enthusiastically participating in the activity and told their teacher lab was an exciting project to work on.