On 16th January, 20 girls made up from each Year 7 form class took part in a school trip to North London Collegiate School. After arriving, these girls were put into groups of ten and mixed with a few girls from NLC before it was revealed to them that they had to solve a staged vandalism case. Their suspects were Mariyah Monet, Tabitha Trombone, Anya Armstrong and Diya Daffodil (who were all year twelves who played these parts for interviews). We did four activities to help us in our investigation. One of which was an interrogation. After interviewing the suspects, everyone seemed to have one flaw that could prove them guilty. So we needed more evidence. To do that, we looked at different pieces of hair under microscopes. This was a key part of our investigation because once we knew which animal hair was found at the crime scene, we could link it to which people were around that animal before.
Another interesting way we added to our evidence was using Chromatography. You can use Chromatography with many different liquids but we did it with ink. We had three different ink wells; each from one of the suspects. As well as that, we were also given a Chromatograph from the vandalised painting to compare the inks with. In between two of the activities, the girls were given a break for lunch in which they had pizza, wedges, salad and a piece of chocolate cake.
The last thing we did to back up our investigation was called a splatter analyses. For this activity we dropped drops of ink onto a piece of paper from different heights to see which height splatter that we made best matched the one that people found under the painting. The activity that was not related to the investigation was very exciting. It was to find the DNA of a Strawberry and although it was not at all related to the case, it was the one I enjoyed most of all.
To finish the day, in our separate groups, we did presentations of our findings and who we thought was the culprit. The person responsible for the vandalism (as everyone expected) was Mariyah Monet.

Aoife Davis 7R

Click here for more photos