All these events will take place in 2027, and registration will open closer to the dates.

Health and Wellness Day

Spring 2027

Explore Public Health, Kinesiology, Recreation and more in this hands on look at the health practices and scientific developments in our communities

Physical Sciences Day

TBD 2027

An exciting hands-on experience designed for secondary school students to explore the worlds of chemistry, earth science, and physics through interactive activities, demonstrations, and learning sessions led by university faculty and students. Come discover how the physical sciences help us understand the world around us—and get a taste of university life along the way!

Information and Communications Technology Day

TBD 2027

Ever wondered what it’s actually like to build video games and design interactive experiences? Come spend a day at Brock University’s Department of Digital Humanities and find out through a series of hands-on sessions designed for ICT Specialist High Skills Majors.

Sport Management Day

TBD 2027

Hosted by SPMA Council, in collaboration with Brock Recruitment, this exciting opportunity is designed to educate, inspire, and prepare SHSM students who are passionate about the Sport and Recreation sector and interested in pursuing Sport Management at Brock University. Don’t miss out on the chance to learn, connect, and get a head start on your future in the world of sport management!

Goodman Business Day

TBD 2027

The Goodman School of Business welcomes students to explore campus, participate in mock lectures, and learn all about our fantastic institution at Brock University.

Date

• November 10, 17, 24 and December 1, 2026

Eligibility

• Open to Arts and Culture SHSM and Music classes

Description

Take a guided tour of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock’s downtown arts campus. Enjoy a provided lunch followed by a student concert next door at the First Ontario Performing Arts Centre.

Sample Schedule

We are excited to announce that we are offering a student/teacher night for our fall mainstage production of People, Places and Things at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts.

What does this mean? It means that any educators or current high school students can use the code PPTteachers to get two FREE tickets to our mainstage show.

Date, Time and Location

November 12, 2026 at 7:30 p.m.
Marilyn I. Walker Theatre, MIWSFPA
15 Artists’ Common, St. Catharines

Tickets are available through Brock University Tickets.

Two FREE tickets with code PPTteachers (November 12th ONLY)

This show will be performed in the Marilyn I. Walker Theatre at Brock University’s Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at 15 Artists’ Common in downtown St. Catharines. Limited parking onsite.

To plan your journey to the Marilyn I. Walker Theatre, for parking, directions, or accessibility, click here to view our Visiting the Marilyn I. Walker Theatre webpage.

More information about our fall mainstage

People, Places and Things

Written by Duncan Macmillan
Directed by Danielle Wilson

Set Design by Nigel Scott
Costume Design by Alexa Fraser
Sound Design and Original Music by Joe Lapinski
Movement Direction by Trevor Copp

Emma was having the time of her life.

Now she’s in rehab.

Her first step is to admit that she has a problem. But the problem isn’t with Emma. It’s with conveying everything else. She needs to tell the truth. But she’s smart enough to know that there’s no such thing.

When intoxication feels like the only way to survive the modern world, how can she ever sober up?

People, Places and Things is a physical and theatrical journey through Emma’s detox, denial, relapse, and the struggle to recover her mental and physical health. Time stretches, collapses, and perception warps while Emma attempts to distinguish authenticity from artifice.

The play is both dark and humorous and examines the boundary between performance and truth.

Date

• December 10, 2026
• Registration opens on November 3 at 8:30 am

Eligibility

Open to Social Science classes in Grades 10, 11 and 12

Description

Inspire the Next Generation of Changemakers!

Learn more about what Brock University’s Faculty of Social Sciences has to offer through our Faculty of Social Sciences Day! Our interactive sessions give students the opportunity to explore career paths in the social sciences, get a taste of the university experience, learn how to think critically about important local and global issues, and participate in interactive activities led by current faculty members.

Session Information

Understanding Children & Youth from Multiple Perspectives

How is childhood conceptualized? How do children develop? Why does childhood matter? These are the questions we discuss in Child and Youth Studies! In this session, we discuss childhood and how it is made possible by the social and cultural world. We will discuss how children are using their voices to mobilize change, challenge conventional ideas (about race, disability, technology and other issues) and deepen our understandings of the future of childhood.

Do you know your rights at work?

Every employee has the right to be treated fairly at work, but some employers violate the rights of employees more often than you might think. This session is focused on learning about workers’ rights and how you can go about strengthening and enforcing them.

Wow, That’s Psychology?!

When we think of psychology, we often associate it with counselling. However, psychology is actually the science of understanding people, and it includes a wide range of topic areas. In this interactive presentation, we will discuss some of these areas and take part in a couple of cognitive psychology experiments to better understand how the mind processes information.

Do we need a ‘nutrition label’ for our internet plans?

Explore some of the common complaints Canadians have made about their home internet service and work in groups to prototype a nutrition style label for internet plans to provide clearer information to Canadian consumers in the future. This session will be facilitated by the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film.

Stranger Things…and Politics?

The popular TV series Stranger Things is based on the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, but gaming isn’t just for fun — role-playing simulations also help us to understand the world of politics. Play a brief simulation with us, The Starship Game, to see how political scientists use games to understand elections, justice, and war and peace. Hopefully Vecna doesn’t show up while we’re playing…but we can’t promise he won’t.

Introducing Critical Animal Studies: Law, Social Justice, and Environmental Policy

Orcas recently gripped the public imagination as they attacked boats and even sank a few. Were they just playing or were they animal vigilantes, rebelling against centuries of ocean plunder and environmental destruction? The field of Critical Animal Studies is a multidisciplinary area that explores questions about human and nonhuman animal relationships. In this presentation, you will learn about ground-breaking developments in animal law, animal protection, ethology (animal behaviour), ecology, and social justice advocacy.

Mapping with open-source GIS

Maps are one way geographers identify geographical patterns such as global warming or the spread of Covid-19. Identifying geographical patterns helps us find a pattern’s underlying causes. In this guided activity, we make a map using QGIS. Unlike commercial software packages (e.g., ArcGIS), QGIS is a popular and free open-source software package for Windows, Apple and Linux computers. Access to computer, software and data will be provided, but you make the map (with our guidance). This guided activity also provide you a glimpse into how we run courses that incorporate weekly computer labs.

Communication Sciences & Disorders – A Crash Course!

See how language is represented in the brain and discover the impact of a stroke on language as you check out the aphasia test battery! Practice using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to transcribe your name onto a nametag to take home. Learn about early language acquisition – from babbling to sentences. Listen to our audio clips and make a timeline of the major early language milestones. All this and more in our interactive crash course – led by students, for students!

Elbows Up: Who Really Pays for a Trade War?

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, tariffs have rarely been out of the headlines. They were a central issue in Canada’s 2025 federal election, and the back-and-forth across the border hasn’t stopped since. Politicians on both sides say the other country pays. Do they? In this session, students run a live cross-border market and see who ends up paying when a tariff hits. Then we look at what the evidence says about who paid for recent tariffs, whether they saved any jobs, and why countries keep retaliating even when everyone loses. Along the way, we’ll see how governments, banks, and businesses use economic insights and skills to answer questions like these.

Niagara 2050: Your Future, Your Choice

What will Niagara look like in 2050, and who gets to decide? In this interactive session, students will explore the social, environmental, and equity challenges of building a sustainable future, while experiencing the interdisciplinary thinking at the heart of Brock’s minor in Environmental Sustainability.

Decoding Gender Online: Media, Power, and How We Push Back

Stop the Hate: Anti-trans Messaging in the Manosphere: The manosphere is all around us, online, in politics, even in schools. Most of us think it’s about hate and violence against women. That’s true, but there’s more: it also pushes anti-trans and racist messaging, online and off. In this hands-on session, you’ll watch a short film, decode real images and stories, then leave able to name how these messages work and how to push back.

Date

• December 10, 2026
• Registration opens on November 3 at 8:30 am

Eligibility

Open to Sciences classes in Grades 10, 11 and 12

Session Information

Grape and Wine Science

Have you ever thought about a career in the exciting grape and wine industry (winemaker, vineyard manager, lab technician, cellar master, research assistant, government scientist, sales and marketing)? Brock University is in the heart of Niagara’s wine country and boasts a 96% job placement rate for graduates from Canada’s only grape and wine undergraduate program called “oenology and viticulture”. Come experience first-hand how we chemically measure acids and sugars in juice before it is turned into wine in the Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute (Lab A Acid and Sugar in juice). Then learn how to use your sense of taste in our state-of-the-art sensory lab to distinguish which juices have high or low acid or sugar (Lab B Sensory). Does acid impact sweetness, does sugar impact sourness? You be the judge.

Molecular Biology

Have you ever wondered how DNA isolation and fingerprinting is carried out to solve crimes? Come experience first-hand two labs that teach you about these techniques. Lab A (DNA Isolation) is the Forensic DNA isolation lab. Imagine this. A crime was committed in the ’70s and circumstantial evidence presented at the trial was instrumental in the sentencing of the accused to life in prison. The convicted declares his innocence. After 30 years in prison, key evidence left behind at the scene holds the clue to determining the innocence of the accused. Students will act as forensic molecular biologists to isolate DNA from the crime scene, which will later be tested to confirm the identity of the suspect. In Lab B (DNA Fingerprinting) you will learn how DNA evidence assists in criminal, missing persons, mass disaster, and paternity cases. You will use current molecular forensic techniques on DNA samples collected from different suspects to identify the culprit. In this activity you will have the opportunity to prepare the samples, load the samples into an agarose gel and analysis the banding pattern using a gel imaging system to identify the culprit.

Ecology and Evolution

Do you enjoy solving problems and enigmas? Do you like to explore the world? Do you wonder why we have the diversity we have? Ecology and evolution is the study of our home, this natural world out there. Understanding its mysteries is a fascinating journey. But there’s more: conserving rare species, protecting natural spaces, monitoring the environment, solving environmental problems, managing resources… Brock University is a great place for this with hands-on experience in the lab and in the field. Being on the Niagara Escarpment, we only have to open the door to be in nature, but we also have farms, vineyards, cities, lakes, and a lot more to explore and learn. Come explore how ecologists estimate population sizes and assess biodiversity (Lab A Population Size and Biodiversity), and then learn about how evolution works (Lab B Evolution)! And stay tuned, a new Applied Ecology Program is coming up soon!

Neuroscience

Have you ever wondered how the brain works? Are you interested in understanding how nerves function to send and receive signals that serve the basis of consciousness? Neuroscience is the study of nervous system function, and goes from the molecular level, through the cellular level, up to the level of entire organisms. Brock University is a great place to study neuroscience, with a thriving neuroscience program and a range of world class researchers. Come and learn how neuroscientists use genetic tools that can be controlled using light in order to control and investigate the function of the nervous system using Optogenetic tools (Lab A Optogenetics and Neural Circuits) and then learn about how brain cells communicate in response to touch and movement (Lab B Touch and neural activity).

Plant Sciences

Plants and algae are extraordinary organisms and play an essential role in the ecosystem. They are photoautotrophs which means they can produce their own food using sunlight and carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Through this process, plants produce sugars and release oxygen, providing the essential energy (or food) that many other organisms need to survive. Autotrophs are extremely diverse and have developed many adaptations to survive different climates. In this plant science module, we will review this in two activities: Supercooling in Plants (lab A) and Phytoplankton diversity (lab B). In lab A, we will review how plants cope with different environments including the ability to withstand freezing temperatures and how we can determine exactly how much cold a plant can tolerate. Meanwhile, during lab B we will review diversity of phytoplankton species found in water bodies in the Niagara region, and how abundance of different species relates to water chemistry, pollution, light and temperature.

Bioinformatics and Biomedical Data Science

Thanks to the rapid advancement of computing and biotechnologies, a lot of biological research questions can be answered by analyzing existing data on powerful modern computers, making bio-computing as a very exciting new field. Bio-computing covers many aspects of biomedical sciences, ranging from drug design, gene discovery, evolutionary biology to personal genomics and precision medicine. In this lab, students will have the opportunities to get a taste of the kinds of cool biomed tasks that can be done on computers. In Lab A Bioinformatics, you will be tasked to find out many important things we know about a human gene (CA9 for the target in Lab B) and retrieve the specific information about its location on the chromosome, the length of the gene, and the size and function of the protein, as well as where in the human body the protein is expressed and how variable the gene is among people. In the Lab B Biomedical Data Science, the students will have a chance to find out how a popular drug, SLC-0111, for treating cancer works by interacting with its protein target in 3D visualization using computer docking, and how you can design new and better drugs by artificial intelligence.

Dates

• December 11 and 18, 2026

Eligibility

• Open to Arts and Culture SHSM and Visual Arts classes
• Limit of 30 students per class

Description

Drawing Workshop: Line and Illusion of Space in Drawing

Drawing accurately from observation is all about learning to see more accurately. This drawing workshop will introduce students to the importance of sighting, measuring, and the use of sensitive line quality to create the illusion of depth. This hands-on drawing activity will build students’ observational skills and confidence in achieving the illusion of three-dimensional space in their drawings.

Sample Schedule

Dates

• December 15, 2026

Eligibility

• Open to Arts and Culture SHSM and Visual Arts classes
• Limit of 30 students per class

Description

Photography Workshop

This workshop introduces students to one of the earliest and most poetic forms of photography – the lumen print. Through a guided, hands-on exploration using light-sensitive paper, natural materials, and sunlight, participants will investigate the foundational principles of photochemical image-making while reflecting on themes of time, transformation, and the materiality of light. The process emphasizes both experimentation and observation, inviting students to consider how natural and environmental forces can act as creative collaborators. Alongside studio practice, brief discussions will situate the lumen print within the broader history of photography and contemporary lens-based art.

Sample Schedule