5 STEM Activities You Can Do at Home This Weekend

Class is once a week. Curiosity doesn't wait. Here are five activities you can do at home — most of them with things already in your kitchen — to keep the learning going between sessions.

None of these require special equipment. All of them spark real conversations about science and engineering. And most of them will end with your kid asking "can we do it again?"

1. Fruit Battery

What you need: A lemon (or potato), two coins of different metals (penny and a dime work great), a short wire or strip of aluminum foil, and an LED.

Push the coins into opposite sides of the fruit, connect them with the wire, and touch the leads of an LED to the two coin ends. If you get it right, the LED lights up — powered entirely by the acid in the fruit.

This is electrochemistry, but your child experiences it as magic. Talk about why the two different metals matter (they need to have different electrical potentials). Talk about why citrus works better than a potato. Then try both and compare.

This is actually one of the kits we sell in our store — it's a great take-home companion to any of our sessions.

2. Egg Drop Challenge

What you need: Raw egg, tape, straws, rubber bands, cotton balls, newspaper — whatever's around.

The rules are simple: build a structure that protects the egg when dropped from a second-floor window or the top of a staircase. The catch: no bubble wrap, no packaging foam — only what you find in the recycling bin.

This is engineering design in its purest form. Kids have to think about energy absorption, weight distribution, and structural integrity — they just won't call it that. They'll call it "making sure Mr. Egg doesn't crack."

Let them fail the first time. The second attempt is always better, and that's the whole point.

3. Build a Marble Run

What you need: Paper towel tubes, tape, scissors, a marble or small ball, and a wall or doorframe to tape things to.

The goal is to get the marble from one point to another — with as many turns and drops as possible — without the marble stopping. Kids have to think about angles, gravity, and momentum, adjusting each section until the whole run works end-to-end.

What makes this especially valuable is that a marble run has many interdependent parts. A change at the top affects everything below it. That's a systems-thinking lesson, and it's genuinely hard — which means genuinely satisfying when it works.

4. Tower Challenge

What you need: 20 spaghetti sticks, 1 meter of tape, 1 meter of string, 1 marshmallow.

Build the tallest freestanding structure you can. The marshmallow has to be on top. You get 18 minutes.

This is one of the most-studied design challenges in engineering education, and for good reason: it's deceptively simple. Most people spend too long planning and not enough time building and testing. Kids tend to outperform adults because they start building immediately.

Time them. Then try again. Ask: what did you do differently the second time?

5. Coding Without a Screen

What you need: Index cards and a willing sibling or parent.

Write a sequence of instructions on cards — forward 2 steps, turn right, forward 1 step — and have someone follow them exactly. No guessing, no improvising. If the instructions are wrong, the person executing them has to say so and stop.

This is exactly how a computer processes a program. If there's a bug (a wrong instruction), the program fails. Kids love being both the programmer and the robot — and when something goes wrong they have to debug the cards, not blame the person following them.

You can make this as simple or complex as you want: add conditionals ("if you hit a wall, turn left"), add loops ("repeat 3 times"), add functions ("the 'turn around' card means turn right twice"). It scales all the way up to real programming logic.