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Best STEM toys for at Home Learning

Raise your kid’s IQ outside of the classroom!

This pandemic is wreaking havoc with parents of school-aged kids. The schools were unprepared for at-home learning, parents have to do their own work and everyone is worried that their kid is going to fall behind without the structure of formal education.

As a Lego Robotics instructor these past 15 years or so, I say hogwash. Here you have the opportunity to let your kids learn something usable and modern. As a parent you’ve been given the golden ticket to have fun with your kids while teaching them and you more about science, engineering and how the world works.

Get that garden growing, go for a walk in nature and learn how to build robots and program them to do your bidding. Here are some resources to get you started.

Top STEM Toys

STEM toys are stealth learning tools. Kids don’t even know they are learning but they are picking up implied mathematics, engineering concepts and learning by doing – physicals, electronics, and science – the skills in demand in their future!

Robots are the future. Give your kid a leg up on the jobs of the future – designing and programming robots!

TOP STEM TOYS:

Sphero SPRK+: App-Enabled Robot Ball with Programmable Sensors + LED Lights – STEM Educational Toy for Kids – Learn JavaScript, Scratch & Swift

  • MORE THAN JUST A ROBOT: Sphero SPRK+ is a programmable robot ball designed to inspire creativity and curiosity through coding and play. Easily learn programming, complete hands-on activities, and share your creations with the community.
  • PROGRAMMABLE SENSORS & LED LIGHTS: SPRK+’s programmable sensors include a gyroscope, accelerometer, motor encoders, and colorful LED lights to create countless play experiences and coding conditions for all levels.
  • EASY TO CODE & CREATE: Powered by the Sphero Edu app, you can program SPRK+ across several platforms using JavaScript. Looking for more fun? Use the Sphero Play app to drive and play games with your coding bot.
  • BUILT TO LEARN & PLAY: With an hour of play, this educational robot is scratch-resistant, waterproof, charges inductively and connects via Bluetooth SMART so you can see your commands and creations come to life.
  • INSPIRING THE CREATORS OF TOMORROW: Founded in 2010, we set out to redefine creative play experiences with the original Sphero app-enabled robot ball. Now, with our undeniably cool fleet of programmable robots and educational tools, we’re inspiring a new generation through hands-on applied learning of coding, science, music and the arts.
Powerful learning system with familiar Lego Technics pieces. Sensor, wheels, motors, brains – Oh My!

Lego Mindstorm Ev3 Core Set 45544

Bricks Includes 541 elements that can be used for teaching science, technology, engineering, math, and computer science.

Curriculum: The LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 Core Set comes with a curriculum pack and includes 48 tutorials to help you and your students learn the basics of LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3.

The 48 step-by-step tutorials are designed to help educators and students master basic and advanced programming as well as hardware and data logging functions. Software and apps The easy-to-learn, easy-to-use EV3 Software and the EV3 Programming app are optimized for classroom use.

Programming is done by dragging and dropping icons into a line to form commands allowing students to build simple programs, and then easily and intuitively build on their skills until they are developing complex algorithms.

The data logging feature inside the EV3 Software is a powerful science tool for carrying out experiments. It is easy to predict, collect, view, analyze and manipulate data from sensors and see the data in interactive graphs. The software is based on LabVIEW, the industry-leading graphical programming language, and is optimized for classroom usage.

The LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 software lets your students: Program robots and other creations Document and track progress using the documentation tool Create and edit content Access the Robot Educator tutorials Log real-time data and calculate data sets (not available on the tablet app) The software is Windows, Mac, Chromebook and iOS compatible.

ThinkFun Gravity Maze Marble Run Brain Game and STEM Toy for Boys and Girls Age 8 and Up – Toy of the Year Award Winner

  • Trusted by Families Worldwide – With over 50 million sold, ThinkFun is the world’s leading manufacturer of brain games and mind challenging puzzles
  • Develops critical skills – Playing your way through the challenges builds spatial reasoning and planning skills, and is partly an engineering and building toy that provides a great stealth learning experience for young players
  • What you get – Gravity Maze is a combination logic game, marble run, and STEM toy that’s one of the best gifts you can buy for boys and girls age 8 and up It contains 60 challenges from beginner to expert, a game grid, 9 towers, 1 target piece, and 3 marbles
  • Clear instructions – Easy to learn with a clear, high-quality instruction manual You can start playing and solving right away
  • Comes with multi-level challenges – Gravity Maze comes with 60 beginner to expert challenges that become increasingly difficult as you play through them
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