At the end of yesterday, we had plenty of dark brown fingerprints, but they were mostly meaningless. As Jake Jackson put it, “You could have all the fingerprints in the world, but they don’t mean much by themselves.” What you need is something to compare them to. What you need is a Fingerprint Database.

Today students learned about the traditional methods of fingerprint classification and then they made a database of all of their classmates’ fingerprints. Each student donated a right thumbprint, and then the each student classified the features they observed. By the end of class, we had narrowed our list down to include only a few suspects.

December 16 – Fingerprint Patterns (pg326)
December 16 – Fingerprint Database (pg327)