On Thursday, April 30th, Hawthorn’s Upper School students jumped on a school bus headed for the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus for an exciting day exploring the world of Forensic Sciences. Thank you to U of T Mississauga’s Program and Outreach Officer at the Institute for Forensic Sciences, Murray Clayton, for carefully curating two programs for our group, a rudimentary one for our younger students, and one with more advanced educational perspectives for our older students. Activities included:
- an Anthropology workshop: students learned about the excavation, recovery and identification of human remains, and were able to see and handle real bone (animal) and casts (human);
- Crime Scene Investigation House demonstrations: students learned about UV lighting, fingerprinting, and blood evidence; the juniors had an activity that used water and reactive fabric mats to recreate blood spatter stains, and the seniors used phenolphthalein to detect the presence of latent blood on evidence.
Students were interested to get hands-on experience with identifying crime evidence and to learn about the wide range of fields involved in forensics, from investigation to law, chemistry to dentistry, criminology to biology, pathology to ballistics… and far beyond! Taking our learning out and about beyond our classrooms is always an eye-opening adventure and introduces us to the practical application of our studies. Thank you to Ms. Yu, Hawthorn’s Admissions Director, for making this wonderful excursion a reality for us!
