Gift Guide: 20+ STEM toy gift ideas for aspiring young builders
Neat gift guide from TechCrunch — featuring our very own AdaBox. Thanks for the shout out!
For this year’s STEM toy gift guide we’ve split out our recommendations by age for easier navigation. The 20+ gift ideas (below) run the gamut from train sets controlled by colorful blocks, to robots that can draw, all the way up to a cute DIY handheld gaming console that’s really an experimental platform for teens to build on.
Gifts we’ve selected hit a range of price points — starting at $15 and topping out at just under $550 (for all the educational LEGO your kid could ever need!), with a spectrum of price points in between.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.