Learning starts at home. Contrary to common belief, education does not start at school; it starts at a very young age and in the comforts of a child’s home. With parents as the first teachers and other members of the environment as support, children are equipped with foundational knowledge at home.
Kids learn through playing, practical experience, and the use of their senses. This is why families need to inculcate a STEM-fueled experience for their children at home to nurture their education and strengthen their foundations.
STEM-based learning, through the foundation of its four primary pillars, science, technology, engineering, and math, stimulates and nourishes a young mind’s enthusiasm for curiosity and learning. This empowers a child to explore and discover the world’s truth and knowledge using their own means.
This is the reason why a STEM-based approach is important to a child’s development – especially during their formative years. To foster an environment rife with opportunities to learn through STEM-founded stimuli, the whole family must work together to build a healthy environment that rewards learning.
It takes a village to raise the next generation of geniuses. So to guide the minds of tomorrow, families need to put their heads together and nurture their children through playing that educates, provides practical experience, and triggers and enriches their five senses.
How do you achieve that? STEM learning is everywhere. It exists in all activities that promote critical thinking and problem-solving for real-world problems. It even exists in games that families can play in collaboration with or in challenging the bright young minds of the family.
Listed below are the funniest games that families can play to help their children develop using STEM-related activities.
This is one of the classics. Group yourselves into teams; it can be as many as you want. A representative from each team goes up a drawing board and is given a mystery subject. The representative will start drawing and the rest of his/her team starts guessing what the drawing is as fast as they can. The fastest team to guess each of the drawings is declared the winner!
It can get pretty crazy when the representatives start to draw and their illustrations look nothing like the subjects they were assigned. Overall, it’s an extremely funny visual game, especially when played with family and friends.
From the title alone, you already that this is one of the funniest ones in the book. The concept revolves around cow abduction – which is funny all in itself. The game, equally hilarious makes use of magnets where one or more players, six years old and above, play logic-based puzzle games.
The gameplay is hysterical as players are required to lift their cows to navigate a plethora of entertaining puzzles and challenges. Players and families can play through a total of 60 different challenges. The best part? Players can customize their own challenges and take on each other concepts with their magnetically airborne milk makers.
An oldie but goldie, Operation is another one of the classics. Besides being one of those games that crack just about everyone up, it exercises a child’s fine motor skills with its steady hand mechanic. This game can be a child’s foundation in learning about the human body as it exhibits a rough depiction of the human form.
Fun for one or more people aged six and up, Operation is a game that teaches players about biology and circuits. Using a tweezer that comes with the game, players are tasked with the mission to save Cavity Sam from his ailments. A fun and educational playing experience for the whole family!
The title should be enough to convince anyone that this is one of the good ones. People love Potato Pirates for two things: the potato puns and potatoes dressed up as pirates. The game features potato puns so bad it’s funny. The Potato Pirates themselves are charming and just cute and fun to play with, too.
It’s hard to not fall in love with the eccentric game. Its gameplay is for the whole family, too! Specifically made for players ages seven and above, the gameplay makes use of sequencing, reasoning, and logical thinking, as players program their offensive on the potato pirate armada. Potato Pirates is a healthy early exposure to simple programming concepts and teaches players about coding symbols. All in all, Potato Pirates is a fun game that engages young minds who play it.
The hilarity of this game is just as high as its actual title – Chicken War. The goal of the game is to raise an army of chickens to wage a glorious battle against opposing forces. In this context, opposing forces mean other chickens.
The game starts with players collecting their chickens that have similar features. This is what constitutes building their armies. Players discard those that don’t look like they belong to the group as they complete their chickens and prime them for war.
Chickens differ in color, props, and attire. The objective of the game is, while players build their army, each of them must discover what chickens the other challengers are collecting. It is a game founded on problem solving and observation. The game stimulates pattern development and visual perception by using a rib-tickling premise.
Hoot! Hoot! This game will be involving a lot of hooting and is definitely the cutest game mechanic in existence for kids. Hoot Owl Hoot is among the favorites when it comes to problem-solving collaborative games out there and is highly acclaimed as a STEM game.
Players, preferably playing with family, must synergize to lead the owls home! Before the sun rises, players must work and collaborate to show the baby owls their way home (their nests). Children will be working with their grown-ups to discover which colored circles to jump onto so the owls can fly closer to their nests on each of their turns. This is a game that provides multi-faceted learning that caters to spatial recognition and stimuli to many senses.
This whimsical collaborative game is a fun adventure game that parents can play with their children and teach them a lesson through the experience as well. The game makes use of a unique mechanic that sets players up with a vertically-positioned board. Magnets are used to explore these vertical playing boards to make for a fun and one-of-a-kind experience. Each player can explore the mazes through game-provided magnets and can be used in both home environments and the classroom as well!
Each game is quick so it makes for more experiences each time it’s played. In the context of STEM learning, gnomes and mazes are the new dungeons and dragons.
How cool are Robot Turtles, right? This game is an amazing introduction to coding elements. It uses futuristic tones to incorporate educational materials for basic computer science. Through Robot Turtles, players are introduced to basic coding knowledge by providing a simple but effective application.
Through its gameplay, players are tasked to move robotic turtles through the power of fundamental coding knowledge. It’s amazing how this game teaches basic coding principles without having to position kids in front of a screen. A truly novel way of introducing something so modern through unique and different ways.
One of the best problem-solving games out there, Mouse Trap is a game of solutions and critical thinking. Everyone who knows Mouse Trap from long before today probably remembers the innovative Mouse Trap gameplay.
Mouse Trap is a fun and exciting kids’ board game that challenges young minds in helping their mice maneuver through a labyrinth of different traps and move through the board without getting caught by sophistically designed contraptions of capture.
Players can also play as villains towards other challengers’ mice, building their versions of the traps to capture opposing rodents as they move through the game board as well. The game was designed for two to four players and is an amazing game for children aged six and up. This game makes beautiful use of critical thinking, problem-solving, and basic inventive principles as they build machination designed for capture.
This is something the whole family can spend lots of time doing. Many studies have found that lego, aside from being a fun-filled entertainment mechanism, is also an important instrument for a developing mind. Legos stimulate visual learning and spatial recognition. It also nurtures creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving in the process, all of which are essential to STEM-based learning.
With the whole family, players can build all sorts of things. From structures, animals, and even vehicles, legos can provide endless possibilities for a family looking for a good time!
The ultimate source of household discord – UNO. Uno is a fun game for getting kids to do math without them even realizing it. It also adds an essential element to games that is resource management. The goal for each player is to get rid of all the cards in their hands. To do so, each player must match colors and numbers while using power cards to add cards onto other challengers’ hands or impede their progress.
Players have to be consistently on their toes because the only way to save themselves from losing is by shouting “UNO” just before a player releases his second to the last card. If a player succeeds in denying an early finish for a challenger, he/she has to draw a card, adding another frustrating card to his/her hand
UNO is an excellent game in administering STEM-based education, incorporating and inculcating elements of problem-solving, critical thinking, resource management, and observation. While notorious for being a catalyst for chaos, a friendly game of UNO is definitely one of the modern wonders of STEM education.
Imagine Snakes and Ladders but competitive, educational, and cutthroat. STEM Family Battle Board game is literally a battle of wits. It’s a fun game for the whole family that can redefine game night.
Get stumped by this STEM trivia game that will pit families against each other in the race through a maze of traps, shortcuts, and cryptic elements. Move through the board swiftly by taking on challenging STEM trivials that tackle 800 different questions that revolve around science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Questions are designed for both kids and adults, referencing video game references and pop culture themes.
The choice is yours: help or hinder fellow players as you race towards the coveted chest to unlock it. Using the classic tabletop mechanism, this game caters to a screen-free experience for a more social and interactive experience.
STEM Family Battle is an efficient and effective educational experiment to teach kids of all ages about science and math in the classroom and even at home.
These are the games that parents can play with their kids as they nurture a STEM-fueled environment. If administered consistently and with care, a child’s development enriched by a STEM-based routine and nourishment will surely help your child grow intellectually, physically, and as a person. This way of life rewards curiosity and thirst for knowledge that will surely help them grow and develop in life.
Not only is STEM education timely today but it is also essential. In recent findings by world-renowned think tanks, the world has sunken into circumstances that demand STEM-centric professionals.
The United States, for example, while often regarded as the frontrunner in innovations in science and technology, is actually ranked 44th in the world in mathematics and science instruction. Out of the 71 countries studied by the PISA Initiative, the US placed 38th in Mathematics and 24th in the Sciences in terms of knowledge and skills.
Learning should be fun. And school is just one aspect of education. Children have lots of time inside the house as children and there is ample time to start nourishing their curiosity and enthusiasm for the unknown at a young age. Through these games and exercises, a family is sure to have a day of excitement to pair with an educational experience that builds STEM-supported foundations.
Hi, my name is Elena Jones, and my full-time job is a teacher. Through teaching, I have discovered that children learn in many different ways, and have seen the positive impact both STEM and Montessori toys have on children.
Through this site I hope to educate parents and adults about these toys, providing them with useful information on how they can be used, and provide some in depth reviews of different toys to consider too.
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