SCIENCE RENDEZVOUS

Design, build, and launch your own rocket from recycled plastic bottles! Learn how gravity, air pressure, and propulsion work, then watch your creation soar. Teams of 4+ welcome.

Make your own DNA bracelet or keychain with colour-coded nucleotide beads, and build a candy double helix from marshmallows, Twizzlers, and skewers. A sweet introduction to the molecule of life.

Build a working prosthetic hand from everyday materials, wire up circuits that power lights and motors, reveal hidden images with colour-changing pH indicators, and see your own heartbeat on a real-time pulse monitor. Explore how biology, medicine, and engineering come together to improve lives.

Code a robotic car using block-based programming to follow lines and dodge obstacles, then race it against other visitors. Plus, cut out and decorate a cardboard robot and learn to balance it on your fingertip by mastering centre of gravity. Take your robot home!

A live stage show featuring spectacular experiments — from liquid nitrogen balloon animals and elephant toothpaste to fire breathing and a flask coated in real silver. Part magic, part chemistry, all spectacle.

Watch wood strips soaked in metal salt solutions burn in vivid colours — bright yellows, greens, reds, and purples — as sodium, copper, potassium, strontium, and calcium reveal their signature hues.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at reduced-gravity experiments set to fly aboard the National Research Council’s Falcon 20 aircraft in summer 2026. Watch real microgravity flight videos, view the experimental apparatus up close, and meet the design team.

Spot diffraction patterns on Canadian dollar bills, send sound through a laser beam, and split white light into a rainbow with a prism. Discover how light powers the technology all around us.

Discover how clouds form by making one in a jar, and use spectroscopes to decode the light emitted by different gases. Try your hand at building thermometers and Cartesian divers, and hear stories from researchers who work just 1,000 km from the North Pole!

Two tables, two extremes. Watch gummy bear combustions and balloon fireworks on the exothermic side, then explore dry ice and liquid nitrogen demos on the cold side. Brave visitors can even light small hydrogen bubbles themselves.

Make your own bath bombs, watch red cabbage juice change colour as a pH indicator, and see sparks fly when iron and aluminium balls collide. Chemistry you can touch, mix, and marvel at.

Watch dyes diffuse through hydrogels of different pore sizes in real time, and try your hand at synthesizing your own polymer — either a hydrogel or a strand of nylon.

Erupt a volcano with baking soda and Mentos, build marshmallow buildings on shaking jelly, and crush layered candies to form mountains. Three hands-on stations exploring the powerful forces that shape our planet.

Watch a superconducting train levitate on a track cooled with liquid nitrogen, and build the “World’s Simplest Electric Motor” to take home. Physics made real.

Dream up green homes of the future! Answer “Question Sparks” and “Career Sparks” on post-it boards, sketch a planet-friendly house, watch videos of 3D construction printers, and handle real sustainable building materials. Free postcards and stickers to take home.

Watch liquid CO₂ transform into a solid “snowball” of dry ice right before your eyes, then see it plunge into warm water to create a cascading fog. A dramatic, kid-friendly introduction to phase changes and sublimation.

Explore hands-on student engineering projects, including a smart chess game where you choose a move and watch a mechanism execute it on the board.

Assemble molecular models of important organic molecules using styrofoam balls and toothpicks. A hands-on introduction to the invisible structures that make up everything around us.

Explore a bicycle engineered to exceed 100 km/h on human power alone. Learn about composite materials, gear ratios, and aerodynamics — and climb inside the bike yourself.

Watch live FRC robot demos, try hands-on activities like screw boards and button making, and chat with team members about their season, their robot, and the world of competitive robotics.

Melt sugar, add flavouring, and cool it into candy — all while learning how crystal structures change through heating and cooling. Best part? You take the candy home.

Pull real DNA from strawberries using household items and see it with your own eyes. Then draw on pH-sensitive agar plates and watch your artwork change colour.

Meet live reptiles up close throughout the day and learn about the ecosystems they come from.

Can your brain be tricked into feeling a fake hand as your own? Experience the famous rubber hand illusion firsthand and discover how your brain uses sensory information to figure out where your body is in space.

Meet the trailblazing women who shaped astronomy at the University of Toronto. See the real scientific instruments they used, try plotting variable stars like Professor Helen Sawyer Hogg, and analyze stellar spectra through a specialized microscope like Professor Ruth Northcott.

Build organelles, string together proteins, and peer into miniature worlds as you explore the latest advances in biology. A hands-on celebration of the building blocks of life.

Paint your own design on an agar plate using fluorescent E. coli, then receive a photo of your glowing bacterial artwork after overnight incubation. Living art, powered by science.

Can you read minds better than AI? Guess a secret word from clues revealed one at a time, then find out whether the clues came from humans or a large language model. Win prizes, and add to a giant collaborative word map.

How do scientists know things they can’t see? Shake, tilt, and probe sealed black boxes to guess the hidden objects inside — then refine your guesses with new tools. Experience the same method of inference scientists use to discover particles, forces, and more.

Roll objects across a gravity table to simulate orbiting planets, view the sun safely through solar-filtered telescopes, and explore a collection of real meteorites and 3D-printed space models. Giveaways included!

Try short, guided engineering challenges led by U of T engineering students and instructors. Learn about Jr. DEEP workshops, camps, and enrichment programs for students in grades 3–12.

Play your way through math with Towers of Kahoy, tangram puzzles, logic challenges, and mental math games. All ages and abilities welcome — facilitators adapt every challenge to you.

Make colourful brain slime, test your memory, simulate a concussion with a helmet and jelly brain, craft brain-connection models from yarn, and explore images of neurodegenerative diseases on a tablet. Six interactive stations exploring what’s inside your head.

Learn about high school outreach programs connecting students to STEAM and medicine.

Watch tiny droplets move, merge, and split on digital and paper-based microfluidic chips — the same technology used for single-cell analysis, diagnostics, and organ-on-chip systems.

Plant your own seeds and take them home to start a garden. A simple, feel-good activity for budding green thumbs of all ages.

Cotton candy, ice cream, popcorn, and a photobooth — a fun pit stop between experiments.