Several small fires broke out on the Tech Valley High School (TVHS) campus on Tuesday, searing into the minds of young scholars’ lessons in arson, fire and combustibles.
Students from a Forensic Sciences class at TVHS and Criminal Justice students from Capital Region BOCES joined forces on a project that saw the students construct from scratch tiny homes made from tongue-depressors and then burn them.
A dozen small houses in all were torched in the project, which taught the students about how structural design, air flow, accelerant usage and other factors impact house fires.
Fire investigation is a unit in both the Criminal Justice program at Career and Technical Education Center and the Forensic Science course at TVHS, Criminal Justice teacher Gerald Place said.
“We have a unit on arson, and when I learned that Tech Valley was doing a project involving the construction and burning of these houses, I thought it would be a great collaboration,” he said.
Students burned their own houses and then analyzed another team’s burnt house to determine the point of origin for the fire and how it spread.
Students said they enjoyed the project.
“It was a really interesting project. You can see the V-shaped pattern and how the fire spread up the wall,” said Jacob Corcoran, a TVHS student from Hudson who plans to enroll in the military and pursue a career in criminal justice.
Criminal Justice program senior Finnigan Wickware, who is pursuing a criminal justice degree in college, said the project really intrigued him.
“I learned how quickly the fire can spread with a small amount of accelerant and how the different burn patterns occurred based on the different designs,” said Wickware, from Ravena.
Aspiring lawyer Temani Thompsons said the project fueled her passion for criminal justice.
“I learned a lot about how fast fire spreads and how different [variables] affect it,” said Thompson, who attends the Criminal Justice program from Guilderland.
Meanwhile, aspiring architect Alec Krein said he learned a lot from the project.
From developing the blueprints for the home his team built and then burnt to analyzing the fire load and burn pattern, the TVHS student from Coxsackie-Athens said the project was “educational and fun.”
