What You'll Need
- TV & AppleTV/HDMI/usb
- Computer
- White boards and markers for each group
- Worksheet Printout
How to Use
This activity is pretty heavily narratively driven, and any tricks to help tell the story are helpful -- if you try anything that I don't include here, please put them in the comments to help improve this activity. :)
Show the first slide of the powerpoint, and inform the students that the local bank has been robbed, and we need student's help in order to determine who robbed the bank.
Tell the students that the bank could have been robbed between 10:00-12:00 last night, and the robber needed one hour free to rob the bank.
Introduce each suspect, then proceed to the interviews.
All the questions are the same for each suspect, and it's important that students understand that nobody can lie. I like to have a student voice the investigator and do a funny voice for each of the suspects, or if the class is comfortable enough, have students play both parts and do the funny voices themselves (the activity is greatly enriched by funny voices).
Read each interview at least twice, giving the groups time to write down the statements on their paper. (It may be helpful to demonstrate how to use the chart at the bottom to effectively organize information).
At the end, I usually give students 5-7 minutes to gather their thoughts and get a final answer.
I then move onto the final suspect count, where each group raises their hand when I say the name of the suspect they believe is the robber.
Notes
I've noticed that there's usually a good spread of answers -- which is good, but I'm not quite sure where the issue arises sometimes. More observation of students in the process of deliberation is needed.
Additional clarification may be needed in reminding students that all activities take one hour.
Additional clarification may be needed in what counts as an activity.
The salaryman is the robber.
I'm considering running something like this, and just reading through it, here's where I see potential sources of confusion:
Each "action" takes 1 hour. Sure. But when the salary man says "I left work at 6:00 and rode the train home," does that mean he left work (one action) and then rode the train (a second action) or that both are considered one action and he got home by 7:00?
It's also not clear whether "at X:00" means the hour before or after that time was occupied. "I saw the postman deliver to the convenience store at 11:00." Does that mean his "action" was completed at 11:00 or that was when he started "delivering" for an hour afterwards? If nobody can lie, the clerk also said "the postman delivered my package at 10:00." I don't know if the clerk works at the convenience store, the bank that was robbed, or neither, but it's confusing where most people are.
I think it's very well made, but the language needs to be unambiguous.