Page 49 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Given the nature of the exercise, it made sense that all members of the team had to have a clear idea of what they were looking at. To that end, I set up models of the virtual scenes. This was done using the free web version of SketchUp (https://www. sketchup.com/) and scenes similar to the one in Figure 3 are relatively simple to put together as models of common objects (such as desks, boxes and laptops) are readily available in the SketchUp library for users to insert in their own sketches.1 As seen in the figure, the scene being investigated is that of an office being operated in a shipping container. At first glance, as a means of easing them into the exercise, students will notice the laptop in plain sight as an item of interest. From there, the team will need to explore the rest of the virtual space in order to uncover the other digital evidence present.
When students have identified an item of interest, they would stop in their exploration of the virtual space to talk me through what it is that they would do with the item. Because students are free to perform any action (e.g., if they indicate that they wish to do something potentially destructive to the evidence or perform an action that appears very random and unrelated to their investigation), it would be my job to keep them grounded by providing hints or accommodating their strange requests.
As in Dungeons and Dragons, a degree of luck and chance was incorporated by including a wheel preloaded with options for the scenario (much like rolling a die).
While a virtual approach is not as satisfying as that of the physical offering, it nevertheless boasted two advantages.
First, recordings of the exercise are essential as I often need
to go back and watch them to award marks appropriately. In
the past, I would struggle to operate the camcorder (with its abysmal battery life) while giving verbal feedback at the same time. The virtual offering is much improved as I only have to hit the record button to save a copy of the meeting. This sentiment was shared by colleagues based in the United Kingdom, who extolled the benefits of a Zoom recording over that of having to switch batteries every so often to record students presenting their evidence on the witness stand (yet another exercise I would love to implement in the future). By giving students access to the recordings during the virtual search and seizure exercises, better quality chain of custody documents (in which students detail each evidence item and how and who handled them) were produced.
Secondly, I have been working mostly with old computers, components and other spares. Where more esoteric devices are concerned, I made use of generic-shaped containers to represent
1 As a point of interest, SketchUp has been used by experts to reconstruct crime scenes digitally for demonstration in the courtrooms (St. Clair, Maloney & Schade III 2012) – it may therefore be a worthwhile exercise to give students an assignment in the future in which they must create or reconstruct their own crime scenes.
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.
47