Favourite STEAM toys

There are so many STEAM toys flooding the market at the moment. The ones listed below are ones that we have enjoyed.

LEGO – the possibilities are endless with Lego but the company have also been coming up with new ideas and starting adding coding to their products as well. My son loves Lego Boost. This is an expensive set but you can build 5 different Lego Robots with it and then code your robot to do various things with the Lego Boost app. It is a lot of fun!

Meccano Junior – Another great toy, good quality and sturdy. My son enjoyed building a Meccano car (his set came with three different cars you could build) and enjoyed the tools that came with it.

K’nex – Another well known toy but super for engineering! We had great fun a year or two back building a ferris wheel with the added bonus that it had a motor and you could make it turn. This was of particular interest to my son who loves circuits, motors and all things electric!

John Adams Hot Wires Electricity Kit – This is possibly the most well used toy in our house, by my son in particular but also by my daughter. There are around 70 projects you can with it and all the parts easily click in and out of each other. Projects include making a radio, an alarm, a doorbell, etc.

Bric Structures – We added to our electricity kit last Christmas by purchasing another electricity kit that comes with bricks, similar to lego bricks. This has given my son in particular great fun as he can create buildings, etc that have moving parts.

Coding Mouse – This is great for coding with younger children and my daughter enjoys this one. You create different mazes for the mouse to navigate through to find the cheese. You code the mouse by simply pressing the buttons on his back (left arrow to go left, right arrow to go right, etc). It comes with a number of maze cards to copy or you can create your own. It also comes with direction cards so you can plan out the mouse’s route before you programme him.

Circuit Maze – This is a challenging game that my son got for Christmas. There are a number of cards, ranging from easy to difficult, with different challenges on them. You have to place the pieces on the board in such a way that the light lights up (i.e. the circuit has been completed).

Rush Hour – This game is similar to the circuits game about but you have to get a particular car out of a really busy car park. Again, there are cards ranging from easy to difficult that show you where to place all the vehicles in the car park. You then need to manouevre the vehicles to allow the red car to leave the car park.

Some of these games we have ordered online from the likes of Amazon but a great Irish shop and website to check out is Cogs the Brain Shop located in St Stephen’s Green. Their website is here.