Michigan State University’s annual Science Festival starts this week, offering a slew of events throughout the month, including nights at the museum (Potter Park Zoo and the Broad Art Museum), STEAM Expo days (April 11 and 12), a statewide astronomy night (April 25) and a jam-packed choose-your-own-adventure day for youth (April 18).
The month kicks off with a Biology on Tap session Thursday evening (April 2), featuring talks by assistant horticulture Professor Mason McNair about how Dungeons & Dragons can be used as a tool for high-school-level botany education and by post-doctoral fellow Aathmaja Anandhi Rangarajan about how bacteria decide to live alone or in communities and what that means for human health, industry and agriculture. The event is open to all ages, but the topics may be most appreciated by those 18 and older.
Most of the Science Festival events are interactive and geared toward youth, such as Tuesday’s (April 7) demonstration of the En-ROADS climate simulator, which gives anyone the ability to test their own global climate scenarios.
April 18 will be an especially eventful day, with more than two dozen campus events geared toward kids and teens, including campus bicycle tours and tours of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams as well as sessions about comics, plants, virtual reality, salt, conservation, spiders, birding, soil painting, botanical pigments and much more.