Virtual Science Ltd
Forensic Biology School
This application uses a games approach to familiarise the students with Crime Scene Investigation as taught in the Cambridge Advanced National in Applied Science Unit F185 Forensic Biology. In the Crime Scene Training Room is the site of a robbery in a greenhouse. The students must gather the evidence without contaminating the crime scene and take it to the Crime Laboratory. You can see the soil culture station to the right. The user needs to interact with every stage, first dragging the soil samples to the test-tubes, then adding water. The samples are then transferred to the petri dishes using a pipette needing a new tip for each transfer. Then the petri dishes are incubated before the final culture can be viewed.
Here the Comparison Microscope is used to compare fibres collected from the scene. Slides of the fibres can be dragged to the left and right positions. Both microscopes can be focused and the magnification turret rotated to give higher resolution images of the fibres which are rendered on the computer screen.
This is the Scene of Crime which contains the mock-up of a crime. This is where the students will use the items that they have picked up from the Store Room. For example, they need to obtain a swab of the blood, but it has to be done correctly. They need to place a marker by the blood, take a photograph, use the swab and then label it. The application will give advice when any attempt to collect the evidence incorrectly is made. Then it’s on to the Police Repository to collect the evidence from the suspects.
After the user adds blood and soil samples to the test-tubes, an enzyme must be added and then incubated by setting a temperature and time period. A dye is then added and the samples placed into the wells of the electrophoresis machine. Setting the time and then switching on the machine yields the familiar DNA fingerprints for the crime scene and the suspects allowing them to be compared
Price for a site licence 12 month subscription which includes allowing access to your students on their own machines is just £69. Runs on all modern browsers supporting WebGL (eg Edge, Firefox, Safari), no installation required. Email your official order to sales@virtual-science.co.uk