Medical Mystery Lab: Mini Med School, Forensics & Coding

• Who: Senior, regional science fair front-runner. Project: a home water-quality sensor.
• What happened: Collapsed at his booth 10 minutes before judging. Conscious now, shaky, a cut on his hand from catching the table edge.
• The question: Did he just faint under pressure, or did someone want him out of the competition?

• Dana Cole — placed second to Marcus last year.
• Priya Nair — lab partner who says Marcus stole her idea.
• Tyler Boyd — needs the scholarship that goes to first place.

• 1 automatic blood pressure cuff
• 1 fingertip pulse oximeter
• 1 stethoscope + alcohol wipes
• 1 forehead (temporal) thermometer
• 1 reflex hammer
• 📋 Case File — Vitals page

Blood pressure. Sit quietly for one minute. Wrap the cuff snugly above the elbow. Press START. Record both numbers. Normal for a young adult is around 110–120 / 70–80.

Pulse oximetry. Clip the oximeter on your index finger. Wait 10 seconds. Record SpO₂ (normal 96–100%) and pulse (60–100 BPM resting).

Stethoscope. Wipe the earpieces. Point them slightly forward as you put them in. Press the chest piece to the upper-left chest and listen for LUB-DUB — your heart valves closing in sequence.

Temperature. Aim the forehead thermometer at the center of the forehead, press, and read. Normal is about 97–99 °F. A fever would point you toward an infection instead.

Reflexes. Have your partner sit with one leg hanging loose. Tap the soft spot just below the kneecap with the reflex hammer — the lower leg should kick out on its own. That is the patellar reflex. Normal reflexes tell you the nervous system is working.

Your instructor has Marcus's chart. Record his vitals on your Case File, check his pupils (shine a light, watch both shrink, and confirm they react equally — clinicians call this PERRLA), and tap his patellar reflex.

Low BP plus a racing heart plus normal oxygen — with a normal temperature and normal reflexes — is not a simple faint. A fever would suggest infection; off reflexes would suggest something neurological. Neither is here. That pattern fits a reaction to something he was exposed to. Note it in your Case File: this may not be an accident.

Do 20 jumping jacks, then re-check your own blood pressure, pulse, and oxygen. Which moved most, and why? Athletes often have a lower resting heart rate. What would that tell you about a patient?

Paramedics are the first medical professionals on the scene. Every skill you just used is what they do on every shift. EMT certification takes about 6 weeks; paramedic training builds on top of that. EMT pay in California runs roughly $40–55K, paramedics $60–90K. Bakersfield College runs both an EMT program and a paramedic program right here in Kern County.

• Needle driver
• Tissue forceps
• Suture thread with curved needles

Bananas are at the front table — your instructor has them ready with a small cut. The banana is your practice skin.

• Gloves on before you touch any instrument.
• Point the needle away from yourself and your partner, always.
• Park the needle in your banana when you are not stitching. Never set a loose needle on the table.
• Every needle goes in the sharps container at the front. If you nick yourself, tell your instructor right away.

Hold the needle driver like a pen, thumb and ring finger in the rings. Grip the needle two-thirds from the tip. Hold the forceps like tweezers. Watch the technique, then warm up on a banana — its skin behaves a lot like real tissue.

1. Enter at 90° on one side of the cut, drive through, exit the other side at the same depth.
2. Pull through until about two inches of thread remain on the short side.
3. Tie the instrument knot (square knot): first throw, wrap the long end counter-clockwise around the driver, grab the short end, pull through. Second throw, wrap clockwise, grab, pull. That knot will not slip.
4. Trim the tails to about 5 mm.

Use the banana your instructor prepared — its small cut stands in for Marcus's wound. Place 3 to 5 simple interrupted sutures to close it. Aim for:

• Edges meet — no overlap, no gap.
• Even spacing — about 5 mm apart.
• Even tension — snug, not tearing the peel.

Score your own three stitches in your Case File: spacing, tension, knot. Pick the one thing you would improve on the next stitch.

Surgeons in training place over 10,000 practice sutures before they ever close a wound on a real patient. The muscle memory is like learning an instrument — you cannot read your way to it. Every stitch you place today counts.

• Physician Assistant: about 6 years of school. Sutures, prescribes, diagnoses. $100–130K.
• Nurse Practitioner: RN first, then a master's. Runs clinics. $110–140K. One of the fastest-growing health roles.
• ER physician / surgeon: longer path, $300K+. Closes lacerations every shift.

Local paths: CSU Bakersfield nursing and pre-health programs, Bakersfield College nursing.

• Wear gloves. Your own prints contaminate the evidence.
• Write everything down. A finding with no notes is not evidence.
• One person did this. Pay as much attention to who does not match.

No two people on Earth have the same fingerprints, not even identical twins. Prints come in three basic patterns: loop, whorl, and arch. Learn your own first, then work out the scene print and match it to a suspect.

1. Print yourself first. Ink each finger and roll it onto your 10-print card — roll, do not smash, one finger at a time. Wipe your hands when you finish.
2. Find your pattern. Under the magnifier, is your thumb a loop, a whorl, or an arch? Most prints mix features — pick the one that dominates.
3. Work out the scene print. Look at the print lifted from Marcus's water bottle and decide its pattern yourself.
4. Match it. Compare the scene print to Dana's, Priya's, and Tyler's cards. Same pattern and the same ridge details = match. Record who matches in your Case File.

A note was left on Marcus's project. Handwriting is hard to fake because the small habits — how you slant, loop, and cross your letters — are automatic. When investigators need a comparison, they have each suspect copy a phrase on the spot. That is called request writing.

1. Write your own sample. In your normal handwriting, copy the phrase on your sheet: "The time has come to take what's owed."
2. Line up the evidence. Put the scene note next to Dana's, Priya's, and Tyler's exemplars.
3. Compare the same letter, not the whole thing. Find the t in the note, then the t in each suspect's writing. Check slant first (left, right, or straight), then letter shapes and spacing.
4. Match it. Whose writing matches the note? Record it in your Case File.

Crime-scene techs lift and compare prints; questioned-document examiners analyze handwriting, forgeries, and altered records. Most start with a 2-year degree in criminal justice or forensic science. California pay starts around $55–85K and climbs past $90K with experience. The Kern County Sheriff's crime lab and Bakersfield College's Administration of Justice program are the local on-ramps.

• 1 Makey Makey + USB cable + alligator clips
• 1 laptop (browser only — nothing to install)
• 3–4 foil pads + alligator clips (Space, Up, Down; Left for the stretch)

Plug the Makey Makey into the laptop's USB port. Open apps.makeymakey.com/piano in the browser. No login, no install.

1. Clip one wire to EARTH (the bottom row) and hold the metal end, or clip it to your wrist.
2. With your other hand, touch the SPACE pad. The piano plays — because the current ran through you to complete the circuit. (The current is far too small to feel.)
3. Now hold hands with your partner: one of you on EARTH, the other touches SPACE. It still works. You just sent a signal through two human bodies.

This is the same idea behind an ECG: the body carries electrical signals, and the right sensor can read them.

Make a foil pad and clip it to an arrow key on the Makey Makey. A suspect holds EARTH and rests a finger on the pad. When they answer a question and press down, the circuit closes and your code reacts on screen.

Your teacher will play this quick demo of how a Makey Makey talks to Scratch. Then you build your own from a blank project.

Clip three foil pads to the top of the Makey Makey — SPACE, UP, and DOWN — and clip one more wire to EARTH to hold. Touching a pad while holding EARTH closes that circuit.

1. Start a project. Go to scratch.mit.edu and click Create. Click Add Extension (bottom-left) and choose Makey Makey.
2. Wire up Clue 1. Drag out when space key pressed, then snap on say [Clue 1: low BP + a racing heart, a reaction not a faint] for 2 seconds. Touch your SPACE pad — the cat says your clue.
3. Add Clue 2 and Clue 3. Do the same on when up arrow key pressed for the handwriting-match clue, and when down arrow key pressed for the fingerprint clue.
4. Test it. Touch each pad. All three clues should appear on screen.

No internet in your corner? The offline Scratch app and the plain when [key] pressed Events blocks work the same way with your Makey Makey.

Biomedical engineers design the machines that read the body's electrical signals — ECG monitors, pacemakers, prosthetics you control with your muscles. The path is an engineering degree plus a focus on biology. Pay runs roughly $75–110K and up. CSU Bakersfield offers engineering and computer science degrees that feed straight into this field.

As a team, decide: Was it an accident or sabotage? If sabotage, who did it — and which two pieces of evidence are strong enough to back you up? Real cases are not built on one clue. They are built on clues that agree.