Year Nine Students Solve a Murder

Walking to House Tutor, we saw Mr Smeelie hanging up barcodes labeled with different numbers, not realising that what would be in store for our history lesson that morning would involve running around scanning the labels, while of course still being as quiet as possible for the classes not fortunate to be doing Year 9 History. Combined with another History class, we spent the period trying to solve a murder mystery, using the evidence that each barcode presented to help us. In groups of around two to four, everyone managed to work together to try to find the most logical answer to the riddles. Even though none of the groups has gotten the answer correct (although some were close), everyone had managed to explain a reasoning for their answers. This activity was a lot different from what we usually do, but we had fun using both humanities skills to include supporting evidence into our reasoning and working to create a complex reason for these actions. I think we thought that this was a great activity to do for both education and to have a little bit of fun.  

Emma Hines (9 Frew)