How Long Does it Take for a Student to Complete?

The short answer to the question is that “It depends.”

Murder at Old Fields is a self-directed activity for the students so, the first and most important factor, is the capability and work ethic of the individual student.

It also depends on the student’s grade level. Murder at Old Fields is successfully used by students from Grade 7 up to the community college level. More advanced students are most likely to complete the activity in a shorter period of time.

It also depends on the lab(s) being conducted. Some of the labs will take longer (like Fingerprint Analysis) than other labs (like DNA Analysis).

All that being said, just to give you some sort of guidance, if you had students in 10th grade of average capability, an allocation of 5 – 10 hours of engagement time to complete all the lessons, quizzes and labs in Murder at Old Fields would be a fair estimate.

Keep in mind, this estimate is based on engagement time. Teachers will often choose to pace their students through the activity using the Lesson Plan feature. In this way, they may “dip into” the Murder at Old Fields Blood Typing Lab when they are covering that topic via other means during the normal course of their Forensic Science semester.

In this way, Murder at Old Fields can be applied throughout the course of an entire semester.