Date:

• Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Available for:

Grade 10, 11 and 12 classes

Sample Schedule

Session Information

INTERACTIONS

Session 1: Psychology
Unraveling the Psychology of Everyday Life

What are the underlying psychological mechanisms behind our day-to-day decision-making and interpersonal interactions? In this session, we will examine subtle yet powerful influence and persuasion tactics that play out in our daily interactions. Furthermore, we will delve into the darker side of humanity, exploring topics such as cognitive biases, prejudice, and aggression.

Session 2: Labour Studies
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.

INTERVENTIONS

Session 1: Forensic Psychology and Criminal Justice
Slot 1: Considering Youth Mental Health in Community Corrections

How is youth mental health addressed in community corrections? In this session, we will engage in a collaborative exercise looking at a mock risk-need assessment for youth to create an effective plan for intervention for a young person involved in community corrections.

Slot 2: Policing the Police in Canada

What happens when police officers in Ontario break the law? This session will explore how the Canadian justice system responds to such incidents and will highlight important trends regarding the nature of police misconduct, violence, and use of lethal force.

Session 2: Applied Linguistics
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!

FUTURES

Session 1: Economics
How The Rich Get Rich: Lessons from Economics

What does economics say about who gets rich? Does it make sense to invest in assets – stocks, crypto, real estate, etc. – or is entrepreneurship a more guaranteed path to success? How do the wealthy maintain their wealth? This presentation will use economics research to answer these questions and more.

Session 2: Sociology
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.

PERSPECTIVES

Session 1: Geography & Tourism Studies
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 allows us to investigate and solve real-world problems. In this guided activity, we will make a map using QGIS, a popular and free open-source software for analyzing spatial data. Access to a computer will be provided.

Session 2: Child & Youth Studies
Understanding Children & Youth: “When you are young they assume you know nothing”

What is a child? How is childhood defined by the social and cultural world, by developmental psychology, and by our definitions of “normal” vs. “abnormal” bodies and minds? Using multimedia examples, in this session, we will discuss how different perspectives on children and youth give us a deeper understanding of, and appreciation for, how young people develop, learn, behave, negotiate, and interact.

ENTERTAINMENT

Session 1: Communication, Pop Culture and Film
Featured for You: Understanding Netflix with CPCF 

Did Netflix change television? Will Netflix and other video-on-demand services contribute to the end of movie-going? How do the “recommended for you” algorithms work and how do they shape our consumption of media and our engagement with culture? In this session, we will explore how learners could engage streaming media by analyzing content, and also by critically exploring algorithms and the increasing platformization of media industries.

Session 2: Political Science
“Baldur’s Gate 3…and Politics?

The popular video game Baldur’s Gate 3 is based on the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, but gaming isn’t just for fun – role-playing simulations also help us to understand the world of politics. Come play a round or two with us, in this session, to see how we use games to understand elections, justice, and war and peace. Hopefully Orin the Red doesn’t show up while we’re playing…but we can’t promise she won’t.

Date:

• Thursday, April 25, 2024

Available for:

Agriculture SHSM, Food Processing SHSM, and Chemistry and Biology classes

Sample Schedule

Session Information

GRAPE AND WINE SCIENCE

Have you ever thought about a career in the exciting grape and wine industry? 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). 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). Does acid impact sweetness, does sugar impact sourness? You be the judge.

ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION

Do you enjoy solving problems and enigmas? Do you like to explore the world? Are you fascinated by our diversity? Ecology and evolution is the study of our home, and understanding its mysteries is a fascinating journey. At Brock, you can learn how to conserve rare species, protect natural spaces, monitor the environment, solve environmental problems and manage resources through hands-on experience in the lab and in the field. Our location on the Niagara Escarpment gives us access to nature just by opening a door. The Niagara region also has farms, vineyards, cities, lakes, and a lot more to explore and learn. Come explore how ecologists estimate population sizes and assess biodiversity (Lab A), and then learn about how evolution works (Lab B)! Students will also learn about a new Applied Ecology program coming soon to Brock!

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

Imagine this: a crime was committed in the 1970s and circumstantial evidence presented at the trial was instrumental in the sentencing of the accused to life in prison. The convicted declares their innocence. After 30 years in prison, key evidence left behind at the scene holds the clue to determining the innocence of the accused. In the forensic DNA isolation lab (Lab A), 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 the DNA fingerprinting lab (Lab B), students will learn how DNA evidence assists in criminal, missing persons, mass disaster, and paternity cases. They will use current molecular forensic techniques on DNA samples collected from different suspects to identify the culprit.

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). Then, learn how brain cells communicate in response to touch and movement (Lab B).

PLANT SCIENCES

Plants 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 create sugars and release oxygen. Therefore, plants produce the necessary energy (or food) for many other organisms to exist. Plants are extremely diverse and are adaptable to many different climates. They have adapted in amazing ways to deal with different environmental conditions such as changing light levels, drought, and freezing stress. Learn 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 (Lab A). Then, test if grape buds have survived a cold weather event by dissecting the bud (Lab B).

BIOINFORMATICS & 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. This makes bio-computing 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 theme, students will have the opportunity to get a taste of the kinds of cool biomedical tasks that can be done on computers. In Lab A, students will be tasked to discover important things 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, 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 they can design new and better drugs with artificial intelligence.