Curiouser and Curiouser

curiousER and curiouser

Science Toys That Encourage Experimentation and Exploration

by JACQUELINE CUCCO, associate editor

WITH THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR OFF TO A SOLID START, IT’S TIME FOR KIDS TO GET those brains churning again. More toys than ever before are incorporating STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) concepts into playtime. The focus this year is on interactive toys that push kids to experiment and explore.

These educational toys make sure there is no more sitting back and blankly staring at screens or playing with the same old one-dimensional items. This new breed of science toys encourages kids to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. For instance, kids can use household items to create chemical reactions with the Crayola Color Chemistry Lab Set, and conduct their own cabbage juice pH tests with Thames & Kosmos’ Ooze Labs Chemistry Station. Kids can even build their own robotic hand with littleBits’ Base Inventor Kit, and sew up soft plastic suture training skin to learn about animals with Alex Toys’ Scientific Explorer Veterinary Science.

Toys provide a more hands-on approach for kids to discover chemistry, physics, and what makes the solar system tick. Get into the nitty gritty of our favorite new science toys below.

Kids can build their own technology with LITTLEBITS’ Base Inventor Kit. There are 12 in-app activities that teach kids how to create different inventions, including a voice-activated robo-hand and an intruder alarm.

Beaker Creatures Liquid Reactor Super Lab, from LEARNING RESOURCES, is a working lab set that includes fizzing reactor r pods with a surprise Beaker Creature hidden inside. Kids can follow the steps to dissolve the pod to reveal and classify which of the 35 collectible characters they received. The Beaker Creatures set also doubles as a working lab set, with instructions for additional science experiments.

THAMES & KOSMOS’ Ooze Labs Chemistry Station is a lab set with which kids can experiment and create slimy, fizzy, bubbly creations using the included tools, such as a syringe, a petri dish, a funnel, and more. The kit features printed cards that clip onto the lab station with approximately 20 experiments, including glowing slime, color-changing slime, fizzing reactions, oozing bubbles, rainbows in a test tube, chromatography, cabbage juice pH tests, solutions, filtering, crystals, a fire extinguisher, and an underwater volcano.

NSI INTERNATIONAL‘s Smithsonian Planetarium Projector is a dual-function projector that replicates the night sky onto a flat surface, such as the ceiling of a room. It creates a rotating star pattern of the northern sky, projected with 24 HD space images, including planets, nebulas, moons, and asteroids.

SMARTLAB TOYS’ Ultimate Vortex Generator is a tornado in a beaker. Kids can make 20 chemistry experiments using the spinning magnetic mixer, such as watching solutions foam and change color as chemical reactions collide with the dynamic forces of moving fluids.

With CRAYOLA‘s Color Chemistry Lab Set, kids can create up to 50 colorful STEAM experiments at home. The set includes enough Crayola materials and supplies to perform experiments right out of the box, including an erupting volcano and glow-in-the-dark worms. Kids can add household items to complete additional projects.

Kids can have an interactive, hands-on learning experience with HORIZON GROUP’s Discovery Extreme Chemistry Lab. The set features more than 20 fun experiments, including simple chemical reactions, fizzing and foaming eruptions, glowing worms, galactic spheres, and more.

MATTEL’s Jurassic World Playleontology Kit is an excavation set that comes with a hammer, a brush, and a shovel. Kids can dig through the excavation site to reveal dinosaur bones, then build and display a full-scale T. rex.

The GeoSafari Jr. Talking Telescope, from EDUCATIONAL IN- SIGHTS, includes 24 images of planets, stars, and space to introduce kids to concepts of outer space and space objects. The telescope features a fact mode and a quiz mode.

Scientific Explorer Veterinary Science, from ALEX TOYS, teaches kids about the basics of being a vet and taking care of animals. Kids can simulate veterinary x-rays and sonograms with red and blue lenses that reveal the insides of animals; close up wounds and cuts with the soft plastic suture training skin, plastic surgical tweezers, a needle, and thread; create an anatomy poster; make gelly ticks to learn about which types of ticks can cause illness; and make casts for broken bones.