Students at Franklin Community High School dropped fake blood from pipettes and measured the diameter of those blood drops to find out how a woman died.
The exercise was the science lab portion of a year-long course titled Principals of Biomedical Science, one of four Project Lead the Way classes the high school began rolling out starting last year. In the class, students learn about the death of an imaginary person named Anna Garcia, who hit her head as she collapsed and died, leaving blood drops on the floor. Students don’t know if she died of homicide, an accident or natural causes until mid-September, and they don’t learn the exact cause of death until the end of the school year.
Principals of Biomedical Science is the first in a series of four year-long elective science classes taught at the high school under Project Lead the Way. The second course of the series, Human Body Systems, is in its first year at Franklin, a course which is similar to anatomy. In that class, students add clay representing body systems to a skeleton split in half, eventually filling it by the end of the school year, high school science teacher Kelly Lo said.
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The third class, physical intervention, involves prosthesis, although it won’t be introduced to Franklin High School classrooms until next year. The fourth course, biomedical innovation, takes place outside the classroom, and can be fulfilled by a professional experience, such as an internship with an oncologist, Lo said.
Students are still required to take biology and two semesters of a physical science, which can be either chemistry or physics, in order to graduate, she said.
Last year, during the first year of the Principals of Biomedical Science course, teachers picked a ruptured spleen as Garcia’s cause of death. Lo and high school science teacher Jeff Karns split five sections totaling 140 students, and have not yet decided what this year’s cause of death will be.
Karns finds the diagnostic aspect of the class the most intriguing, he said.
“I definitely love teaching this class and I like the whole program; I can’t wait until all four years are implemented,” Karns said of Project Lead the Way. “My favorite part of it is learning about different medical conditions, diseases and disorders, from diabetes and sickle cell to infectious diseases.”
During the infectious disease portion of the class, students dissect sheep hearts to learn about how blood flows through the different chambers of the heart, he said.
Lo finds the first part of the year, where students investigate the death as a possible homicide, her favorite unit, she said.
“I personally love the forensics unit because students love it and once we get to a lot of the diseases it’s hammered hard on them for months,” Lo said. “The (Project Lead the Way) courses in general are so hands-on and students are always doing things.”
During the class involving blood spatter, student dropped fake blood from pipettes from various heights, including the height of the imaginary person, five feet, four inches, and the height of the table she hit her head on. They measured the diameter of those droplets to see which most closely matched what was found next to her body. If the diameter of the blood matched when dropped from her full height, she could have been struck or shot while she was standing, but otherwise, something else may have caused her to fall and her hitting her head on the table resulted in the bloodshed, Lo said.
Several students who have goals of pursuing a scientific career are taking the Principals of Biomedical Science class.
Lucy Ho, a senior, wants to go into the medical field and likes the investigative aspect of the class, she said.
“I just like the process of learning what happens and the fact that it connects to real-life jobs and what we can do after school. I also want to go into the medical field; I’ve wanted to my whole life,” Ho said.
“(In this class) you have to take a lot more steps than I thought to see one thing. You have to analyze every detail of a fingerprint to find out who it is.”
Sophomore Bethany Hickey said the class is helping her understand the real-world applications of science, she said.
“I thought it was really cool learning about a crime scene and how different things help you figure out about the crime that happened,” Hickey said. “Blood and DNA help you figure out what happened.”
Marina Cabo Garcia, an exchange student from Spain, learned how to determine the time of death based on body temperature. Cabo Garcia wants to be a biomedical engineer, she said.
“We used a substance that has water as a substitute for body fluid and had to use a machine to measure temperature,” Cabo Garcia said. “We drew a graph and calculate the average and we did an equation to calculate the hours that have passed and how it would affect (body) temperature.”
