Appropriate for: All Ages

Enjoy a walking tour, supplemented with online reading and audio recordings, that brings to life many of the centuries-old historical trees on the MSU Campus. The tour focuses on trees of north campus that pre-date the University or have been planted since. Learn how and why WJ Beal, US President Teddy Roosevelt, and MSU President Abbot planted some of these trees.

Learn more about Every Spartan Tree Has a Story: Historic Trees in the MSU Campus Arboretum with Frank Telewski

Appropriate for: All Ages

Learn how this new building technology made from a timeless material - wood - unites forests with our built environments to create beautiful, healthy buildings that can play an important role in holistic climate change solutions.
“Mass timber” is an umbrella term referring to a variety of engineered, panelized wood construction materials that can be used in a variety of buildings to create the structural system or to create non-structural and decorative elements. When used for structure, mass timber can displace steel or concrete or reduce the need for these carbon-intensive materials to significantly reduce the embodied carbon footprint (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted to source, manufacture, and transport materials) of a building. In addition, the materials made from wood – a renewable resource – actually store for the duration of their use in the building the carbon sequestered by trees as they grow in forests, helping to keep that carbon out of the atmosphere where it would contribute to climate change. The Michigan State University STEM Teaching and Learning Facility is the first building in Michigan to use mass timber as the basis of its structural system.

Learn more about Mass Timber: What Is It? And Why Does It Matter for Michigan?

Appropriate for: All Ages

Join MSU's Office of Sustainability and the MSU Surplus Store & Recycling Center for a behind-the-scenes tour of the campus recycling facility and Grow Green Vermicompost operation. Explore how MSU hand-sorts recyclables with the help of a robot. See and smell how composting works. Meet the Spartan worms that transform campus food scraps into nutrient-rich "black gold" for gardens, farms and houseplants! The tour and talk will encourage you to continue going green and touch briefly on why your efforts matter!

Learn more about Behind-the-Scenes: MSU Recycling & "Re-Earth" Tour

Appropriate for: All Ages

Visit the Indoor 4-H Children's Garden to experience Butterflies in the Garden!

Learn more about Butterflies in the Garden

Appropriate for: All Ages

Our lab will demonstrate a technique called ‘optical tweezers,’ using lasers to reach out, grab, and manipulate individual swimming cells. It is a very interactive, hands-on method with video game-like joystick action. We invite the public into the lab to directly use our microscope and try to catch and grab hold of live cells and interact with them. We will be learning about cells from the bottom up, and about the latest in technology that allows us to see and interact with individual cells and molecules.

Learn more about Laser Tweezers: Reach Out and Grab Bacteria!

Appropriate for: All Ages

Explore exciting materials science and engineering hands-on demonstrations with the MSU Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science!

Learn more about Materials Science and Engineering Demonstrations

Appropriate for: All Ages

Join us in the MSU Herbarium and Plant Biology Teaching Conservatory for behind-the-scenes tours and activities that bring the story of a museum specimen to life. This is a first-hand opportunity to experience how a herbarium stewards knowledge about plant biodiversity. From a living plant to a pressed one, learn about what herbarium specimens are, where they come from, and some of the unique ways they’re used by researchers right here at MSU.

Learn more about Getting to the Root of Botany: Behind the Scenes in the MSU Herbarium

Appropriate for: All Ages

MSU is home to a wide variety of exciting research at the forefront of quantum computing and information science. Take a tour of the Laboratory for Hybrid Quantum Systems (LHQS) at MSU. Get a chance to see first-hand the exciting quantum research happening and ask questions to the researchers making it happen.

Learn more about Quantum Computing at MSU

Appropriate for: All Ages

Visit the MSU Bug House to learn about insects and other arthropods! Have a chance to meet and interact up close with live beetles, tarantulas, cockroaches, scorpions, and more! Explore the over 1,000 preserved insects from around the globe.

Learn more about Explore the Amazing World of Insects at the Bug House!

Appropriate for: All Ages

Visit the MSU Libraries Digital Scholarship Lab to experience multiple visualization types. Check out group immersive experiences in our 360-degree visualization room. Try on a VR headset to explore the world of 3D content. Have the opportunity to create your own 3D content through a workshop.

Learn more about Immersive Visualization in the MSU Libraries Digital Scholarship Lab

Appropriate for: All Ages

Tour the MSU Libraries Hollander Makerspace! See a variety of 3D printers in action and learn about our technologies which are available to the public. Explore a digital Minecraft version of the library using a credit card sized computer, the Raspberry Pi.

Learn more about Makerspace Open House

Appropriate for: All Ages

Audiovisual formats have changed rapidly over the last two centuries. Due to this, preserving them for future audiences is challenging. Often we feel like we cannot touch or handle the object for fear of damaging it forever. Ever wonder what Edison’s wax cylinder would feel like in your hand? What would it sound like to hear the audio on that cylinder? Want to see how we splice films for digitization? The MSU Libraries’ Media Preservation team is offering the chance to learn about different audiovisual formats, how to care for them, and even hear/see footage from our collections.

Learn more about Media Through the Ages: A Petting Zoo

Appropriate for: All Ages

Take a tour of MSU’s new and innovative STEM Teaching & Learning Facility housed in a former power plant. Tours will be available in both guided and self-guided formats. Come check out one of the only mass timber buildings in North America, visit unique learning spaces and labs, and explore art and STEM.

Learn more about Tours of MSU’s STEM Teaching & Learning Facility

Appropriate for: All Ages

Tower Guard holds the keys to Beaumont Tower, one of the iconic structures of MSU. Take a tour of the tower, while learning about its history and significance.

Tower Guard is a second-year student organization and honor society dedicated to serving the Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities (RCPD) at Michigan State University. Tower Guard collaborates with the RCPD to help scribe for exams, create more accessible textbooks, hold one-on-one tutoring, and build a more inclusive environment for all Spartans.

Learn more about Beaumont Tower Tours

Appropriate for: All Ages

Vernal pools are more than just mud puddles in the woods that dry out in the summer! They are extremely important and diverse features in our forest ecosystems that provide critical habitat for a variety of organisms. These pools are important sources of food and water in early spring when very little else is available. Join us in MSU's Baker Woodlot to look and listen for the unique invertebrates, amphibians, and other critters that make these special pools their home.

Learn more about What's Wet in the Woods? Vernal Pools!

Appropriate for: All Ages

MSU’s supercomputer can perform four quadrillion math operations in a single second. One human working every second of every day would take over 128 million years to do the same! This massive speedup is critical for computational researchers from multidisciplinary backgrounds to conduct their work. The Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (ICER) provides support and computing services for this cyberinfrastructure. Join ICER in exploring the supercomputing center in a virtual 360-degree tour that walks you through the critical hardware components, the impressive cooling system, the process of running applications, and more. Do not miss the accompanying introductory video led by Eniac, ICER’s animated computer node!

Learn more about Supercomputing in 360 Degrees: Explore the Nuts and Bolts!

Appropriate for: Elementary school age, Middle school age, High school age, Over 21 years only

Visit the WJ Beal Botanical Garden and explore the plants that come awake in the early spring and accomplish their whole reproductive cycle before the trees leaf out. Many of them are protected from the crowd of eager herbivores by their interesting toxins, and some of those toxins have even become valuable medicines.

Learn more about Sleeping Beauty's Arsenal at the WJ Beal Botanical Garden

Appropriate for: All Ages

Plants have produced fossils of their evolutionary history since late in the Silurian period. Explore some of the benchmarks of plant geological history as demonstrated by the large and varied WJ Beal Botanical Garden collections. These developments illustrate plant evolution from before the age of fishes to well past the extinction of the non-bird dinosaurs.

Learn more about Plants in Geological History Tour at the WJ Beal Botanical Garden

Appropriate for: Elementary school age, Middle school age, High school age, Over 21 years only

In celebration of the anticipated May 2022 opening of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) as a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility, the public is invited to get a behind-the-scenes look at a special “FRIB Countdown” event on Saturday, April 23.

The event will run from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the last tours starting at 4 p.m. It is free and open to all ages, and no appointment is necessary to participate.

The FRIB Countdown offers the public a glimpse at FRIB before FRIB’s scientific research program actually begins. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about FRIB and rare-isotope research before FRIB opens its doors to scientific users from around the world.

Learn more about Countdown to FRIB

Appropriate for: All Ages

Explore a world-class rare isotope laboratory where nuclei are smashed into a target at half the speed of light! You’ll see footage of the new 1500-foot-long linear accelerator, then explore the research spaces inside MSU’s Facility for Rare Isotope Beams using photospheres. Our “virtual tour” takes you to many locations that would normally be inaccessible!

Learn more about A Virtual Tour of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB)

Appropriate for: All Ages

Did you know that there are over 20,000 trees on the MSU campus? Ever wonder what some of those trees are? Take a walk with WJ Beal Botanical Garden staff member Carolyn Miller as she leads you across north campus to look at native Michigan trees and a few special trees that are on our campus. End your tour with a native planting along the Red Cedar River, where we will plant native species to protect the riverbank from erosion and help support our native pollinators.

Learn more about Native Michigan Trees of the MSU Campus Arboretum

Appropriate for: All Ages

Gather around the campfire for a fun evening of campfires, flashlight hikes, and exciting hands-on activities focused on natural science and the beauty of the nature around us. Come hike the trails after dark, dissect owl pellets, learn about how to identify trees, and more! We’ll end the night with a presentation by the campfire, so come join us to learn more about the nature that’s right in our backyards!

Learn more about Campfire Science

Appropriate for: All Ages

Stop by any time during this drop-in event and learn how to use the smartphone iNaturalist app to identify plants. We’ll provide handouts and have botanists standing by to help you use this fun, easy, and free app that uses photos you submit to identify plants (and animals and fungi) encountered in nature. The images you take are cataloged online and form the basis of an observation that scientists and the public can use to learn about where plants grow and when they are flowering. Visitors may also collect wild plant material in the morning to bring to the second plant identification event in the afternoon of the same day. Your observations in the Red Cedar River Corridor in the W.J. Beal Botanical Garden will help inform our riverside restoration project. It will be an opportunity to learn about restoration, conservation, native plants, invasives, land use history, and more.

Learn more about Become a Botanist I: Identify Plants and Make Scientific Observations with iNaturalist

Appropriate for: All Ages

Visit the Michigan State University Herbarium (a ‘plant library’) to learn about plant identification using comparison, dichotomous keys, measurements, and microscopes. Guests will get first-hand experience comparing plants they collected to specimens in the Herbarium to confirm IDs. This is a more advanced workshop that builds on the information from the morning workshop (attendance not required). Learn how to identify plants like a professional, use the tools in the MSU Herbarium, and learn about native plant diversity.

Learn more about Become a Botanist II: Identify Plants with the MSU Herbarium and Dichotomous Keys