CSI in the Classroom: my all-time favorite game-based activity in teaching my Research Writing class

We all have our worst nightmare. As a teacher, mine would be to be branded by my students as “boring”. And to handle a three-hour class on Research Methods and Writing for seniors, I think one foot is already on that.

I was fortunate enough to be one of the first teachers to handle the new basic education curriculum in the country. To teach “new” material could mean a lot of things. Either you run the risk of teaching it the wrong way due to lack of source material or you see it as an endless possibility to discover new teaching strategies.

I decided to take it as the latter. Using the curriculum guide as a standard and my basic blueprint, I kept on looking for ways to teach the subject beyond the lecture method.

Hours of research led me to a paper titled, CSI in the Classroom: Using Crime Solving Games to Teach Research and Evaluation. And as a Sherlock Holmes fan, it was the perfect material for me.

This paper basically describes the correlation between what a detective does to that of a researcher. Knowing the profile of my students, Netflix binge-watchers like I was, I was pretty confident that using CSI will be a good hook to capture their interest.

The paper just briefly describes applying crime solving games. As a teacher, I had complete autonomy over which crime solving mystery to use. As a disclaimer too, this paper discusses the use of games which is not be confused with the concept of gamification.

Now there are a number of “Whodunnit” materials in the Internet. Crime mysteries range from murder, bank robbery, or kidnapping cases. In choosing which mystery to use, I suggest using these simple guidelines: 1) the grade level and 2) their interests and personality. Are they into comic books, Marvel superheroes, and Sherlock Holmes like majority of my students? They would probably enjoy a murder mystery. Are they more reserved and a murder mystery could be bothersome? Then a bank robbery case might be more fitting.

However, my personal favorite is using murder mysteries. This is because I can either add or omit evidences so that the case does not look too obvious that it was a murder. In crime solving cases like these, it usually begins with a dead body in the crime scene and I ask my students what would detectives usually rule out first in the beginning of their investigation. And most of the time, especially if they are into TV shows like this, I get the answer I am looking for which is: to rule out if it was an accident, a murder, or a suicide.

While this was not directly discussed in the paper I mentioned earlier, it’s a pretty useful activity to open the discussion on how important it is for a researcher to narrow the research topic. In my experience, guiding students in the journey of deriving their research topic for investigation is one of the most difficult task as a research teacher. It is important that we lead them to that direction without spoon-feeding them the topic and later on, the research questions. The analogy of the crime scene as a wide area of investigation, looking at the different parts of the crime scene until the case is narrowed down to what it is and who the suspects are, was one of the discussions that made our research class richer and more alive.