Page 48 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Mysteries in times of Covid
The national lockdown presented new challenges which placed student engagement levels in the Computer Forensics module at risk. With access to campus out of the picture, both practical exercises had to be shelved. The last thing I wanted was reverting back to a module with a passive ‘I lecture and you listen’ arrangement, made worse with an online audience. While geocaching exercises were definitely not possible (I had no control over where they would venture out to), we were able to make a (virtual) plan to replace the physical search and seizure role-play.
Enter virtual tabletop game Data and Detectives. Styled similarly to Dungeons and Dragons (very much an analogue form of entertainment involving referencing physical game manuals, rolling multi-sided dice, and a HUMAN dungeon master who regales the rest of the players with the story of how they advance through the game map), members of the team would join me on Zoom (or MS Teams) where I would assume the role of the storyteller who reveals events as they crop up throughout the search and seizure exercise on the virtual premises. To help students familiarise themselves with how to play Data and Detectives, a gameplayer’s manual was provided, giving them a sense of how a typical session is played, with tips on how they could convey their actions while at the crime scene.
Figure 3: A Virtual Crime Scene