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Enochs students get high-tech help for 'CSI: Modesto'Jun 21, 2012 (The Modesto Bee - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- "CSI: Modesto" gets several new episodes for the fall season using a cutting edge piece of equipment and some fresh writers. Forensic students at Enochs High volunteered a summer morning to create compelling lesson plans under the lead of veteran teacher Dave Menshew. Biotechnology students will take up the challenges after school starts. Such suck-'em-in science lessons are exactly what employers and educators want to see. This program and countless others are benefiting from industry efforts to boost education in fields lacking qualified workers. Enoch's investigators will get some high-tech help from a Hitachi TM-3000 scanning electron microscope, or "the best toy known to man," as Nancy Weavers likes to call it. Weavers and her husband run Left Coast Instruments, which sells the device and loans it to schools for free through a Hitachi Corp. outreach program. The Enochs science lab gave the model a test run last week and will get to use it for a week in the fall. Enochs is the first high school in Northern California to take advantage of the service, Weavers said. Using the specialty tool, next semester's students will find the ne'er-do-wells behind these fact-riddled fictions: In a story ripped right from the headlines, the case of the missing ballot box examines how a corrupt politician fixed the race -- or did he? The suffocation by pillow of a man in an orchard was no accident, but was it the threatening stalker or someone closer to home who did the dirty deed? Red herrings spin the tales, but real evidence will sort them out. These crimes truly can be solved in an hour. The electron microscope makes barely visible specks viewable at 30,000 times their size, enough to sort out the peach fuzz on one suspect from the cat hair on another. Standard microscopes can magnify to about 1,000 times, Barry Weavers said. The Hitachi's base price of $73,000 is entry level in the major magnification market, he noted. The science behind the high-end viewer dates to the tungsten tubes used in early TVs, although digital advancements give it far greater power, said Jonathan Krupp. Krupp teaches electron microscopy at San Joaquin Delta College, helping train the next generation of technicians for crime labs and industry. His program is one option for Enochs graduates with a forensics or technical investigation interest. High-tech firms use such equipment to scan tiny silicon chips for flaws, as Nancy Weavers demonstrated. At full magnification, the barely half-inch square chip stretched to the length of four football fields. Finding why a chip failed "is like trying to find a needle in a football field, with your nose pressed on the 50-yard line," Weavers said. More power than police With the magnifier, the high school forensics team had more crime-solving technology at its fingertips than local law enforcement. Only FBI and state regional crime labs have such scanners, Stanislaus County forensic autopsy technician Tiffani Mende said. Mende stopped by the Enochs lab to offer students her expertise on the timing of rigor mortis and other deathly details. Those details give the forensic lessons their shuddery appeal to students. "It's like constructing a puzzle of a crime scene. You work backward from the solution," said Enochs senior Stephen Hutchins. He and teammates added plenty of stray turns and twists into their mystery. "You want to booby-trap the maze," Stephen said with a chuckle. Solving a mystery Menshew encourages such plotting, in part because it gives clever students a way to channel their know how to help upcoming students. Those students get to solve a mystery parsed out by their peers. He taps into every government and industry program he can find, mining a network of private and public contacts made over many years. Employers need people with expertise in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. Although California's unemployment rate hovers around 11 percent, half a million jobs here go unfilled because applicants lack the engineering or science background needed, said Chris Roe of the California STEM Learning Network. "They're desperate to find people," he said. California is home to top engines of job-creating corporate innovation and, ironically, students among the worst-prepared to go for jobs those companies offer. Roe blames state testing that largely ignores science in elementary grades, having it count for only 6 percent of schoolwide scores. On national tests, only one in five eighth-graders in the Golden State meet the proficiency mark. Which is why the Enochs forensics class and biotechnology program are under the microscope, as a small sample of innovative efforts to beat those odds. Bee education reporter Nan Austin can be reached at [email protected] or (209) 578-2339. ___ (c)2012 The Modesto Bee (Modesto, Calif.) Visit The Modesto Bee (Modesto, Calif.) at www.modbee.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |