With a margin of just two seconds, James Fallon High School students posted their results and beat 999 other school teams to win this year’s Murder under the Microscope challenge.

Developed by the Centre for Learning Innovation (CLI), Murder under the Microscope is an interactive online game designed to raise environmental awareness in students from Years 5 to 10. The challenge asks students to investigate an environmental “crime”, discover where the crime took place, determine who (or what) the victim is, and who or what is responsible.

James Fallon High science teacher Christine Bell said her Year 8 class (who called themselves the Finito Mosquitoes) enjoyed the project’s interactive nature. She said it was a bit like the TV program CSI and involved “solving a real crime”.

This year, the challenge’s scenario traced the history of land management in the Macquarie catchment area near Dubbo. The victim was the Bush Stone-curlew, a bird once plentiful in numbers but no longer found in the area.

Miss Bell said the project complemented an ecology unit the class had just completed.

“It reinforced all the things we’d been talking about – habitat and ecology, and the different effects land management have on habitat,” she said.

The students from the north Albury-based high school were surprised to discover they had won the competition, Miss Bell said.

“But they beat the other Year 8 [James Fallon High] class that entered by 13 seconds so they were pleased about that,” she said.

The department’s director-general, Michael Coutts-Trotter, presented Miss Bell and two students from the team with a certificate and a laptop at an awards ceremony held last term in Sydney.

More than 650 schools from across Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore and Hong Kong joined in this year’s event.

Go to: www.microscope.edu.au