Fingerprinting Projects
Encourage your students to explore science through fingerprinting projects. There are projects for all age groups that can teach students how to gather information, classify it, analyze it and make hypotheses. At the youngest age, fingerprints can be used for art projects as a way of building awareness that all fingerprints are different. As students get older, the projects can grow in complexity and depth.
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Preschool and Kindergarten
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Using different colors of ink lets your students create beautiful works of fingerprint art. Introduce preschoolers and kindergartners to the concept of fingerprints by creating fingerprint art. Give each student a piece of construction paper and a nontoxic stamp pad. Have the students make fingerprints on the sheet and then draw pictures of animals or use their fingerprints and thumbprints to create a design. You may wish to show them some examples of how a fingerprint can be used to make such animals as a mouse, an owl, an elephant or a butterfly. Hang up the artwork around the class and point out how each fingerprint is different.
Elementary School
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Tell your students that they are going to become fingerprint detectives. Have each student take a piece of construction paper and make fingerprints of all four fingers and the thumb on one hand. Then tape the pieces of paper to the wall. Provide several magnifying glasses and a printout of a fingerprint chart. Have them examine each set of fingerprints and try to identify what type of fingerprints they have according to the chart you give them. Have older elementary students create a bar chart classifying how many of each fingerprint type there are in the classroom.
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Middle School
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You can introduce basic genetics to students by having them compare the fingerprints of relatives and non-relatives. Tell students they are going to do some research to determine whether fingerprint patterns are inherited. Show students how to collect clear fingerprints for an entire hand. If possible, give them a stack of fingerprint cards. Have them collect their own fingerprints. Then have them go home and collect fingerprints of siblings, parents, relatives and friends. They should mark clearly on the back of the card whether the person is a relative (and what the relation is) or a non-relative. On a separate piece of paper have them classify each type of fingerprint according to the major fingerprinting types. Then have them sort each person. Do siblings have similar fingerprint types? How are they related to the types of their parents? Calculate percentages for types of fingerprints and compare. What conclusions do they draw from this? Display some fingerprint pairs to the class and see whether they can predict whether the people who own the fingerprints are related or not.
High School
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Have students determine different ways that fingerprints could be classified for quicker identification. Show the students in your class how to take good fingerprints and create a card that has all of their fingerprints on it. Divide students into groups of three to five people. Have them determine whether they can come up with a classification system for fingerprints based on the fingerprints they've taken. Meanwhile, create a mock crime scene with a single fingerprint from someone in your class. Time the students while they compare the fingerprint individually to each of the cards. Then have them create a classification system and repeat the process with a different fingerprint.
Science Fairs
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Create a project that compares different fingerprint collection methods. Set up a project that shows what different fingerprints look like based on whether they were collected with powder or a chemical, whether the surface of the item was smooth or rough and what the room temperature was where the fingerprint was collected.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit Hi Detail Fingerprint 2 image by Andrew Brown from Fotolia.com color mix image by UBE from Fotolia.com 4 Black Web buttons with fingerprints on them image by Andrew Brown from Fotolia.com fingerprints image by dip from Fotolia.com
