More than 300 local elementary, middle, and high school students visited UC Riverside for Brain Awareness Day on Friday, April 28, touring campus labs and joining hands-on experiments to learn neuroscience.

Hosted by the Neuroscience Graduate Student Association, the event provided visiting students a chance to learn how brain cells function in a variety of activities from handling sheep brains to playing a tag game mimicking how electrical signals travel in a brain. Students also climbed the ropes course at the Student Recreation Center.

About 100 undergraduate and graduate UCR students and faculty volunteers ran demonstration booths where visiting students engaged in neuroscience experiments and demonstrations, tested their knowledge in a trivia contest, and used arts and crafts to demonstrate what they learned.