The Half-Eaten Cookie
You Will Need
- Large, soft cookie that doesn't contain chocolate chips or nuts (we used a sugar cookie)
- Dinner-size Styrofoam plates cut into 6 equal wedges (1 plate for every 3 suspects)
- Scissors
- Pen or permanent marker
Your Junior Detective Assignment
Practice matching a bite in a cookie to samples of your suspects' dental indentations. Missing, crooked, or new teeth, along with the overall size and shape of a person's mouth, create a unique impression. Identifying a bite mark could lead you straight to the guilty mouth. To perfect this technique, you'll first need to have someone take a single bite from the cookie (hey, no one said this detective stuff was easy!).
Gather several willing accomplices and have one person take the bite without anyone telling you who did it. Next, stack the Styrofoam wedges in pairs, then cut off the points of the triangles about 1 inch from the tips. Have each suspect bite down on a set of wedges. Note which is the top and which is the bottom of each pair, as well as whom each one belongs to. Now compare the overall size and shape, as well as the individual tooth impressions of each bite mark, with those in the cookie. Can you discern a match?
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