­
My best and worst IT lessons #4: Murder Mystery — ICT & Computing in Education
  • Front Page
  • Search
    • Digital Education
    • Terry Freedman's Books Bulletin
  • RSS
    • Welcome
    • The "About" Page
    • Testimonials
    • CV/Resumé
    • My Writing
    • Published articles
  • Corrections Policy
Menu

ICT & Computing in Education

Articles on education technology and related topics
  • Front Page
  • Search
  • Newsletters
    • Digital Education
    • Terry Freedman's Books Bulletin
  • RSS
  • Info
    • Welcome
    • The "About" Page
    • Testimonials
    • CV/Resumé
    • My Writing
    • Published articles
  • Corrections Policy

My best and worst IT lessons #4: Murder Mystery

January 12, 2016

Looking for clues. Picture from www.pixabay.com CC0

Some men love fast cars. Others love women. Me? I love spreadsheets and databases. But when it comes to teaching such things, how can you make them interesting? I think this applies particularly to databases. Flat file databases are, it seems to me, inherently boring. Relational databases are much more interesting. Perhaps because they are more useful, though I suspect the real reason is that they are so much more complicated.

Like most teachers I imagine, I introduced flat file databases before tackling relational ones, but after teaching the basics, and how to do simple and complex searches, I thought I'd try an experiment.

I had particular objectives in mind:

  • The database had to be very large, because I didn't want the pupils to be able to find data simply by looking through the records or by sorting them.
  • The searches had to have a real purpose, or at least real in the sense that they could be searches that someone would carry out "in real life".
  • The activity had to be fun.

The solution

I created a very large database of over 1,000 records and 27 fields. Then I set them a murder mystery to be solved. This was in the form of a brief story and a number of statements to the police.

For example, one statement said something like "I saw someone with blonde hair who was eating a cheese sandwich. I was in the Chinese take-away and listening to some jazz music on the radio at the time".

The pupils had to work out whether witnesses were telling the truth or not. Thus in the above example, if they discovered that the person making the statement doesn't like jazz music or Chinese food, they would put them on a list of suspects. Eventually, by finding the person who had told the most lies, that person would be identified as the culprit.

Not exactly robust evidence, but still.

The whole exercise was very successful. Why?

What made this a success?

  • It met all the objectives cited earlier.
  • The pupils were doing Boolean searches but they first had to work out what the search actually was. Taking the example cited above, they would have had to search for people who had blonde hair and liked cheese sandwiches before they could go much further. But there wasn't an instruction to do that: they had to infer it for themselves.
  • The lesson had an element of competition: pupils were trying as hard as they could to be the first to solve the mystery.

The really nice thing about compiling such a large database was that it was a good investment of time, as I was able to use it in other lessons too. I even gave it to the science department, so they could use it to teach pupils to test hypotheses. For example: only old people like blues music.

I was also able to use it show the maths department how to dig deeper into the data by using pivot tables.

So even though the data had been made up, the database proved to be a fantastically flexible resource.

 

In Best and worst IT lessons, Using and Teaching Computing & ICT Tags database, murder mystery
← Who's trackin' ya, baby? 5 reasons there is a shortage of Computing at School Master Teachers, and what we can do about it →
Recent book reviews
Backlist: The Written World
Backlist: The Written World

Writing was invented ‘only’ a few thousand years ago. It’s a fascinating story.

Read More →
Backlist: What I'm reading: Bounce
Backlist: What I'm reading: Bounce

What does it take to become an expert? And what can the Computing teacher do about it?

Read More →
Backlist: The Fourth Education Revolution
Backlist: The Fourth Education Revolution

The title of this book invites curiosity: what were the other three ‘revolutions?

Read More →
A book review for your English department colleagues perhaps
A book review for your English department colleagues perhaps

Some of these stories are so richly told, it can almost seem as though you’re right there with him.

Read More →
Review: Pen Names
Review: Pen Names

OK, so this has nothing to do with education technology, but we all read (I hope!). A very interesting examination of the pen names some authors have adopted, and why.

Read More →
Review: The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History
Review: The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History

There's a really interesting section in this book about how ceramic storage of data and information is probably the most likely medium to stand the test of time.

Read More →
A book review for your biology colleagues perhaps
A book review for your biology colleagues perhaps

The subject under discussion here is how human physiology has developed in different ways, in response to different conditions around the world.

Read More →
Review: Social Media for Academics
Review: Social Media for Academics

This book is very readable, and if I sound surprised that is because it’s not always true of academics!

Read More →
Quick looks: VIBE Coding by Example
Quick looks: VIBE Coding by Example

For the time being, this book is free in Kindle format.

Read More →
Review: The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too
Review: The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too

Despite the relative paucity of immediately obvious National Curriculum links, teachers will find several of sections of this book to be highly engaging.

Read More →
Dig+Ed+Banner.jpg

Contact us

Privacy

Cookies

Terms and conditions

This website is powered by Squarespace

(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved