🧪WORKSHOPS🧪

Science For offers hands-on science workshops across Metro Vancouver, designed for learners from kindergarten to senior citizens. Whether it’s a one-time event or a multi-session series, each workshop sparks curiosity and builds scientific understanding through meaningful, accessible experiences. We tailor content to the group’s needs—whether it’s a lively elementary class, a homeschool co-op, or a group of older adults looking to explore science in a relaxed, engaging way. Seniors especially enjoy our easy-paced workshops that honour their lived experience while offering new ideas and hands-on fun.

Younger Kids (Grades K–3)
Our workshops for younger learners focus on sparking curiosity through hands-on activities and exploration. We tailor each session to be engaging, interactive, and paced to suit early learners’ attention spans. These experiences build foundational science skills in a fun, supportive environment.

Common Senses

Let’s learn about our five senses – what they are, how they work, and how to trick them! Each participant will investigate his or her own senses and make observations.

Stuck on Magnets

How do magnets work? How do we know what materials are magnetic? How are magnets used in everyday situations? In this workshop, students experiment to answer these, and other, questions about magnets.

Matter Matters

We hear about solids, liquids, and gases – but what about those strange things in between? Learn about polymers, which affect nearly every aspect of our lives. Investigate some especially strange liquids that break the laws of Physics. Finally, learn a bit about the 4th and 5th states of matter!

Animal Architects

How do living things use what’s in their environment to ensure survival? Through hands-on activities, forage like a bird, to build a safe home for your young, and collect a tasty meal (for a spider)! You might find that your classroom or schoolyard ‘habitat’ has some surprises in store – good and bad!

Features of Nature

On a short walk through a nearby natural area, students will explore the features of plants and animals. They will learn how those features help the organisms survive and thrive in their environment.

Middle Kids (Grades 4–7)
Our workshops for middle-grade learners dive deeper into scientific concepts while keeping a strong focus on creativity and exploration. Sessions encourage critical thinking, collaboration, and hands-on problem-solving, with activities designed to challenge and inspire. These experiences help students strengthen core science skills and apply them in exciting, real-world contexts.

Animal Adaptations

Some animals have some pretty zany parts and behaviours that they’ve developed to help them stay alive in their habitat. Let’s learn about them and see how changing environments mean changing adaptations.

Thermic Reactions

When chemicals react with each other, they undergo changes. Some of the most common kinds of reactions change the temperature of the ingredients. We’ll learn how and why this happens while getting comfortable with making (and sharing!) observations and hypotheses.

The Health of Our Waterways

Students will work on site in a local creek or stream to test biological, chemical, and physical properties to determine the health of our waterways. The combined results give a holistic idea of how well that site supports the plants and animals living there. We will discuss what human actions might impact our results.

Cycles of Nature

From ancient rocks to short-lived insects, from the organ system in a single organism to entire ecosystems, our natural world moves in cycles. While walking through a nearby natural area, your class will explore the cycles of energy and material moving through and supporting life in all its forms.

Mission to Planet Ecks

As honorary astrophysicists, participants face the challenges of getting to and operating in the extreme environment of a newly-discovered planet. Designing and building a lander craft will challenge abilities to work as a team, use resources efficiently, make and revise plans, and integrate knowledge of basic physics.

Rainbows & Underpants

Combinatorics is a type of math that figures out the order of tasks, predicts results, and suggests rules. In what order do you get dressed? Does it matter? After deciding that, we use coloured bands and crayons to discover a bunch of different ways we can make patterns. With younger students, practice writing letters or words is incorporated. Older students will practice explaining processes to others.

High School (Grade 8–12)

Our workshops for high school students explore advanced scientific ideas and their connections to the world around us. Through inquiry-based projects, collaboration, and real-world problem-solving, participants develop not only strong academic skills but also a sense of responsibility as informed, thoughtful citizens. These experiences prepare students to apply science in ways that make a positive impact on their communities and beyond.

The Diversity of Nature

Explore the drivers and impacts of diversity in a nearby natural area. Search for the differences between organisms that lead to their unique traits, as well as the similarities that allow us to group things together for study. Consider how the health of the non-natural portions of your ecosystem affect the living things.

Flight Show

This show will have you on the edge of your seat as our scientist takes you on a high-speed trip through the history of humans trying to fly. Explosions! Ridiculousness with audience participation! Fire! Loud noises! Potty humour! **Must be in a room with high ceilings or outside.

Water Quality and Chemical Testing

Using a number of Chemistry and Physics experiments, students will measure and interpret some of the parameters that determine the health of a creek near their school

The Best Parachute

A seemingly straightforward question opens up a discussion about how to design a good experiment, how to interpret data, what bias really means, and how the way you talk about your results affects what people learn from your science. Participants will conduct experiments to test different designs and compare their results to others, based on socially-determined criteria.

All-Ages & Community

We offer workshops for community centres, farmer’s markets, scouts, garden groups, clubs, and other community organizations — as well as school classroom groups of all ages. We love tailoring programs to meet your needs, whether that means accommodating disabilities, supporting English language learners, adapting to unusual settings, exploring niche interests, or engaging a wide range of age groups in one session.

We’re All a bunch of Rocket Scientists

Through building, testing, redesigning, and retesting a rocket, participants discover the major forces involved in flight and develop and understanding of the basics of aerodynamics.

Save Our Sound

Learn to use bathymetry to map our 3D Howe Sound models as we tell you about endangered glass sponge reefs. Scientist-educators from Science For Inc. explain how professional scientists explore the ocean floor from a boat on the surface using the process of bathymetry, and how this information is crucial to preserving the sponges that are unique to Howe Sound.

Meet the Trees

Let’s get to know some of our local trees. Scientists use botany, ecology, chemistry, and math to study trees. In this workshop, learn why different trees have different features, what is common among all trees, and what changes trees’ experiences throughout the year.

The Unusual Race

Engineering and Physics, creativity and teamwork, patience and courage — these all come together in this insight-inducing design challenge with a most unusual goal!

Pollinator Series – Seed Paper

Our Pollinator Series introduces you to many of the pollinators found in local gardens. Each season of the year has at least one workshop in our Pollinator Series. Check back often to see them all! In this workshop, we will make natural paper full of seeds that you can plant to attract all sorts of pollinators!

Water Critters

In this outdoor, onsite workshop, participants learn about benthic macroinvertebrates, or the small critters that live on the bottom of our waterways, and what these animals can tell us about the health of the water.

Guided Nature Walks

Our expert naturalist will show you the ever-changing wonders of your local ecosystems. This workshop is different every time, as it responds to the seasons and the participants. Please contact us to discuss your specific interests.

Oil Spill Response

When oil leaks from a supertanker at sea or a pipe on land, the impact on the surrounding environment is severe and complex. After learning about what happens at ground zero, we’ll test out physical, chemical, and biological clean-up methods used by rescue workers and engineers.

Pollinator Series – Bee Safari

Our Pollinator Series introduces you to many of the pollinators found in local gardens. Each season of the year has at least one workshop in our Pollinator Series. Check back often to see them all! In this workshop, we will explore a garden space near you to discover and identify the bees and other pollinators found there.

Workshops for Seniors

Our workshops for seniors are specially designed to be enriching, accessible, and easy-paced. Each session combines engaging talks with hands-on activities that build on the skills and knowledge participants already have, while introducing new ideas in a relaxed, supportive setting. We bring all supplies to your location, and our team is fully vaccinated, police-checked, and first-aid certified.

Explore the Ocean Floor

Learn to use bathymetry to map our 3D Howe Sound models as we tell you about endangered glass sponge reefs. Scientist-educators from Science For explain how professional scientists explore the ocean floor from a boat on the surface using the process of bathymetry, and how this information is crucial to preserving the sponges that are unique to Howe Sound.

The Unusual Race

Engineering and Physics, creativity and teamwork, patience and courage — these all come together in this insight-inducing design challenge with a most unusual goal!

Pollinator Series – Bee Safari

Our Pollinator Series introduces you to many of the pollinators found in local gardens. Each season of the year has at least one workshop in our Pollinator Series. Check back often to see them all! This workshop is ideal for those who would like to get outside in a nearby garden space. We will explore this space to discover and identify the bees and other pollinators found there.

Oil Spill Clean-Up

Mission to Planet Ecks

Pollinator Series – Homemade Pollinator Paper

Our Pollinator Series introduces you to many of the pollinators found in local gardens. In this workshop, we will make paper full of pollinator-friendly seeds that can be planted to attract pollinators that participants can keep or give as a gift to someone else. Each season of the year has at least one workshop in our Pollinator Series. Check back often to see them all! In this workshop, we will make pollinator-friendly seed paper that can be planted to attract and support local pollinators.