When it’s too hot for kids to play outside or tinker with kits, these activity books are travel-friendly and keep them busy. They are perfectly portable for road trips, plane trips and for keeping them busy in restaurants. I’ve found three amazing STEM-related activity books that start introducing your child to discovering coding, engineering and mathematics — all with a creative and fun twist.

At the top of my list is the Crack the Code! by Sarah Hutt and illustrated by Brenna Vaughn. This activity book is from the Girls Who Code book series. (Btw, this fun, fiction series is a great way to introduce girls into coding and has a great diverse set of girl characters.) The activity book does a great job at making coding concepts fun and gives kids a chance to really be creative. The book may be from Girls Who Code but boys can definitely use this activity book too.

The activity book is filled with topics in computer science such as robots that can make toys, coding in art, animation, music and how it can support social causes as well as 3D printing. There are fun word searches, mazes, connect-the-dots all relating to coding and free open space where kids can draw their own creations, such as drawing their own fibonacci spiral.

The Rosie Revere’s Big Project Book for Bold Engineers by Andrea Beaty and illustrated by David Roberts brings invention and creativity together. It’s a companion workbook to the popular children’s book but just like Girls Who Code, kids don’t need to read the stories before diving into the activity book. The color illustrations and the notebook style design of this activity book is really stellar. I

Here’s a page my daughter worked on in the activity book. With this Rosie Revere story, I love that one of the main concepts is that failure and mistakes eventually lead to a finished product. It teaches kids to not worry about perfection and instead figure out what would be the idea contraption they want to create and to keep iterating their idea.

Also check out the related activity book, Ada Twist’s Big Project Book for Stellar Scientists.

This is Not Another Maths Book by Charlotte Milner and Anna Weltmann was recommended to me by Diana Eng, fashion-tech designer and one of the founding members of NYC Resistor. This book is actually the second book in the series that was first published back in 2015. The first book is called This is Not a Maths Book: A Smart Art Activity Book. Both of these books are sold via independent bookstores on Amazon. They aren’t in print anymore which is unfortunate because every kid should have this book to explore the relationship between math and art.

This book is full of drawing challenges that help kids see mathematical patterns as well as folding paper activities where they can learn how to fold a perfect paper polygon, octagon, tesellation cubes, pollyhedrons and paper snowflakes. In fact, this book has helped my daughter understand geometry in school so much better.

Do you have an cool STEM-related activity books that your child is loving right now? We’d love to know about them so share it with us in the comments!