Holiday Gift Guide: STEM and Engineering Gifts for Kids

Kids who love science once had to be satisfied with building kits and chemistry sets. Nowadays, though, you can find amazing toys for kids who love STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Play is one of the prime ways that children learn. Kids don’t feel pressure when they’re playing, so they develop STEM skills and knowledge even as they’re having fun.

Even preschoolers can enjoy educational toys that open the mysteries of science, and kids can learn everything from coding to how to build a robot. Take a look at some of Keck & Wood’s favorite engineering gift ideas in 2022 for kids at all ages who are passionate about STEM.

	Pinxies Butterfly Hot Air Balloon Six-year-olds can learn how to build a hot air balloon while enjoying the fun designs and action figures of this. Pair the Hot Air Balloon set with other Pinxies toys to build an entire world, so your kids can expand their STEM lessons. Authenticated by STEM.org, these Pinxies sets attract young girls to STEM as they build everything from a fairy tree house to an undersea world.
	Gravity Maze Engineers rely on spatial reasoning in their work, and this game from ThinkFun gets kids started off as young as 8. This exciting marble run comes with 60 challenges that get tougher over time. Kids can also veer off the expected track by using their critical thinking skills to build their own marble runs
	Snap Circuits Light Learning how electricity works is at the heart of several engineering gifts. This particular toy, which is ideal for 8-year-olds, lets kids build electrical circuits on their own circuit board. With more than 100 projects available, kids can have fun creating light shows and playing music. Learning how a circuit board works is key to working with electricity at any age, and this toy uses the same components that kids are likely to use in the lab as they move into middle school and high school.
	Remote Controlled Robot This adorable robot from Wonder Workshop offers all the fun of a remote-controlled car but with a lot of extra features. It pairs learning and play beautifully, linking to apps that let kids solve puzzles and create programs. You can even change up the way this robot looks by connecting Lego to its head. If you want to upgrade, check the Cue Quartz robot, which can talk.
	Coding Critters Kids as young as 4 can start to learn to code with this clever toy from Learning Resources. No screen is needed — kids can code their unicorn, dinosaur or dragon to play hide-and-seek or fetch, and they can interact with their “pet.” No screens are needed for the coding, so kids can enjoy hands-on play.
	Sphero Indi At-Home Learning Kit The Smithsonian considers this kit the best overall STEM toy for kids 8 and up. A robot car senses color, using it to issue coding commands that let kids “drive” the car through programming. Employing drag-and-drop block coding, kids can learn programming in a straightforward way, then graduate to the Sphero Edu Jr app, which enables them to change their programs. Kids have to use spatial reason and computational thinking to play with the toy, and its use grows as children grow, offering a plethora of free resources.

Girls and boys alike love the power they get when they learn to code and build. Start your kids on these STEM and engineering toys to get them to love science and tech at an early age.

Our engineers at Keck & Wood would have loved to have these toys to play with when they were growing up — or maybe they would have invented some of them! For more than 60 years, Keck & Wood has delivered civil engineering services throughout Georgia and beyond, with expertise in infrastructure, transportation, water, stormwater, wastewater and sewer systems. Civil Engineering isn’t a toy to us — though we’ll never stop enjoying what we do — and we love introducing kids to the basics of STEM with toys like these.