15 STEM Kits You'll Feel Good About Giving

Inspire and support a love of STEM with science and engineering kits and books! These 15 kits offer hours of STEM fun, learning, and discovery. What will the kids in your life explore, make, create, or investigate?

Are you already thinking about holiday gift ideas for the young people on your gift list? Science and engineering kits and books make great gifts at any time of the year. With quality STEM kits and books, kids of all ages can explore, invent, experiment, and make discoveries. While they are having fun with their projects, they might even discover a passion for an area of science that inspires them to consider a STEM career path. Plus, they will be learning and building important 21st-century skills at the same time.

Our STEM kits are great for independent school projects and science fairs, but many of these kits are also perfect for fun, at-home, curiosity-driven learning and exploration. Whether you are buying for your children, family, or friends, a gift of STEM is one you can feel good about. Plus, these kits encourage kids to unplug for a bit and shift to hands-on exploration and creation.

15 Gift Ideas to Encourage a Love of STEM

The 15 STEM gift ideas highlighted below offer hours of engaging science and engineering exploration, perfect for kids to do independently at home:

1. Art Bot Robotics Kit

The Art Bot Robotics Kit combines introductory robotics and art. This kit contains all the materials you need (including craft supplies) to build a simple Art Bot robot that shuffles around on marker legs to create colorful, unpredictable designs. (The motors in this kit can also be used to design and build unique Junkbot robots using recycled materials.)

2. micro:bit Go Bundle

The pocket-size micro:bit Kit is a beginner-friendly way to get kids started with integrated electronics and coding exploration at an entry-level price point. With projects ranging from environmental systems to personal health and assistive technology, kids write short programs in a block-based coding environment (similar to Scratch) and upload them to a micro:bit. The micro:bit has built-in input and output features, including a speaker, microphone, LEDs, accelerometer, compass, and programmable buttons. This makes it an accessible and engaging way to introduce kids to coding, circuits, and physical computing. Explore an engaging lineup of projects, from a planetary lander to a mood tracker, in the Pocket-Sized Physical Computing Projects with micro:bit collection.

3. BlueBot 4-in-1 Robotics Kit

The BlueBot 4-in-1 Robotics Kit is one of our top picks for kids who like to build and are ready to take next steps with robotics and circuit building. The BlueBot robot has a good-sized chassis and rugged wheels, and there are four core robot models kids can assemble using guided directions at Science Buddies. Perfect for intermediate robot builders, each robot has a different sensor-based behavior: Motion-Activated Guard Robot, Speedy Light-Tracking Robot, Zippy Line-following Robot, and Obstacle-Avoiding Robot.

The BlueBot kit offers room to grow, too. For advanced students looking to explore computer programming with their robots, a set of additional BlueBot projects helps kids continue to develop their skills as they learn to program BlueBots for specific behaviors using Arduino.

See 10+ Robotics Projects with the BlueBot Kit to explore the full range of BlueBot projects kids can try.

4. Electronics Kit for Arduino

With the Electronics Kit for Arduino, kids can combine electronics and programming to explore circuits and coding with a wide range of projects, including drones, smart home appliances, timers, sensor-based devices, and robots. See Arduino Projects for Students for more project highlights and links to individual directions.

5. DIY Mini Drone Kit

With the Mini Drone Kit, kids can build their own popsicle stick drone and begin to explore the science of drone flight. Once the basic drone is built, extra parts can be added for a series of experiments, including projects that use Arduino programming with the Electronics Kit for Arduino. See DIY Popsicle Stick Drone STEM to learn more about the full series of experiments.

6. DIY Night-Light Kit

With the DIY Night-Light Kit, kids can design and build their own nightlight, including the circuit to turn the light on and off. Find directions and ideas for customizing the housing in the Engineer an LED Night-Light project and in the Make a Night-Light activity. The same circuit and kit also work for the Make an Awesome Paper Lantern activity.

7. Bristlebot Robotics Kit

The Bristlebot Robotics Kit is a great starting point for kids ready to build their first robots. With this kit, kids can build two Bristlebot robots that shuffle around on toothbrush heads. For a related casual building experience, see the Build a Bristlebot, a Tiny Toothbrush Robot STEM activity. They can also explore how design changes shape the movement of a group of robots and use craft and recycled materials to create their own unique vibrobots.

8. Electric Play Dough Kit

With the Electric Play Dough Kit, kids combine the fun of classic dough building with introductory circuits. Using homemade conductive and insulating dough, kids experiment to light up squishy circuit creations with colorful LEDs. Once kids master simple electric play dough circuits, they can move on to more challenging 3D structures like the frog shown below. Multiple resources at Science Buddies help kids learn more about circuits using electric play dough. See our winter-themed examples for extra inspiration.

9. Candy Chromatography Kit

The Candy Chromatography Kit is perfect for a budding young chemist. Kids use paper chromatography to see what dyes make up the colors in hard-shell candies, markers, leaves, flowers, and more. See Paper Chromatography Science Projects & Experiments for more information.

10. Basic Circuits Kit

The Basic Circuits Kit offers an accessible hands-on introduction to electricity and circuits. After learning what makes a closed circuit and experimenting to see what types of materials are conductors versus insulators, students can explore pencil resistors and make a dimmer switch to control the brightness of a light.

11. Spherification Kit

With the Spherification Kit, kids use molecular gastronomy to turn liquids into jiggly spheres that pop in the mouth. They can make custom juice balls (like popping boba) or yogurt ravioli, learning about food science and chemistry along the way. Expect some wiggly, stringy, juicy "worms" as they experiment. That's part of the fun! See Making Juice-filled Boba with a Spherification Science Project and the popping boba and reverse spherification videos for more information.

12. Paper Speaker Kit

With the Paper Speaker Kit, kids can experiment with electromagnetism and the science of sound as they build a working paper speaker.

13. Paper Roller Coaster Kit

With the Paper Roller Coaster Kit, kids can design and build a tabletop marble roller coaster, a fun paper-based engineering project. Kids will be learning about potential and kinetic energy as they work on their design and attempt to add an optional loop.

14. Bath Bomb Science Kit

With the Bath Bomb Science Kit, kids can learn the science behind fizzy bath bombs while testing different recipes to see how changing the amount of an ingredient affects the fizz. The quest to make the fizziest bath bombs is on!

15. Advanced Bristlebots Kit

The Advanced Bristlebots Kit is perfect for kids who have already built simple robots, or for older kids who enjoy following build directions from start to finish. The kit has specialty parts to create either a light-tracking bristlebot or a solar-powered bristlebot. After building one of these robots, kids can recycle the parts to build the other.

Science Buddies Hands-on STEM Books

STEM project books open the door for hours of fun at home. Each book in our series of STEM books contains directions for simple science and engineering activities kids can do in a short amount of time and with readily-available materials. (These STEM titles make great gifts for classroom libraries, too!)

All Science Buddies Kits are sold through our partner, Home Science Tools®®. The Science Buddies line of STEM books are available from Amazon.com.