The Christa McAuliffe Center at Framingham State University continues its season of free, virtual planetarium AstroNights events for families (ages 7+) with an online presentation, No Planet B: Exoplanets and Earth Appreciation, on April 16 at 7PM. In a 30-minute presentation (followed  by Q&A session), learn about planets outside our solar system. View the presentation on Zoom (registration required) or the Christa McAuliffe YouTube channel, where you can view recordings of previous AstroNights events.

MassBay Community College in Wellesley will offer two free, online sessions for STEM faculty, staff, students, graduates, and industry professionals to learn about MassBay’s STEM resources and career options. Register for April 16 at Noon or May 17 at 1PM.

The Cambridge Science Festival will be held virtually this year:  30 Days of Science, April 1-30. Underlying the festival’s many events is the #30DaysofScience Challenge, in which participants sign up and dedicate at least a few minutes each day — either to respond to daily emailed prompts or to pursue their own inquiries — and share their discoveries and questions with that hashtag.

The Wellesley Education Foundation is sponsoring See Yourself in STEM throughout the month of April, and all events are open to the public beyond Wellesley. Register at the links below. The events are free, and you are invited to become a sponsor or donor.

• Panel & Robotics Demo by Wellesley FRC Team Ultraviolet:  April 9, 4PM
• Panel: Wellesley HS Recent Graduates in STEM Careers: April 13, 7:30PM
• A Journey into Pooled Testing: What Happens to My Saliva Sample?: April 26, 6:30PM

There’s also a STEM scavenger hunt for elementary students and two hackathons hosted by Wellesley-based coding companies: iCode (April 24) and Code Ninjas (April 25), each with various age groupings and “office hours” in the week before the event to provide assistance.

Each spring, NEPTUN (a Northeastern University student group) hosts Splash!, a free program for students in Grades 9-12 to take fun and informative mini-classes led by Northeastern undergraduate students. This year, Splash! will be free and held virtually on April 3, 1PM-5PM. Registration is now open and is first-come/first-served and requires setting up a free student account. Separately, you can check out the Digital Splash! online offerings created from the content of previous Splash! courses. For more information, contact nu.neptun@gmail.com. Among the Splash! courses this year are these STEM offerings:

• It’s a Gut Feeling: Engineering and Hacking the Bacteria in Your Body
• Think like an Engineer
• The Limits of Infinity
• This is Your Brain on Drugs: Neuropsychopharmacology
• What really is sleep?
• Psychiatric and Neurological Disorder
• Science at Home Mashup II
• I’m Not a Morning Person: Chronobiology
• Epigenetics: Why everything you know about genetics is wrong
• Antibiotics and Vaccines
• The Cat Conspiracy and Other Mind-Bending Parasites
• What your High School teachers never told you about Chemistry

The Habitat Environmental Action Team (HEAT) — a youth-led group dedicated to climate action in the cities and towns surrounding Habitat Education Center and Wildlie Sanctuary in Belmont — and the Habitat Inter-generational Program (HIP) will host a free, online Inter-Generational Climate Cafe on April 3, 12PM – 1:30PM. People of ages 10+ who are concerned about climate change are invited to discuss climate action initiatives from 1970 to the present. Register here.

The Newton Free Library will offer a virtual session of its Little Lab Coats series, on the Science of Cooking, on April 6, 6PM-7PM for ages 6-9. Registration is required and is available at that link from March 29 at 9AM to April 4 at 6PM.

The Newton Conservators‘ first webinar of the spring season, Learn About Vernal Pools, will be held on April 7 at 7PM. Mass Audubon teacher/naturalist and Newton Conservators board member Barbara Bates will talk about how these season pools form and the varieties of life they support, using as examples two vernal pools in Newton — Bare Pond and Dolan Pond. Register before 3PM the day before.