Our engineer-approved 2022 holiday gift guide offers more than 55 options sure to bring to holiday cheer to the STEM and STEAM lovers in your life.
The holidays are officially here! Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but many of us still have some shopping left to do before lighting the menorah, celebrating the solstice, leaving cookies out for Santa, or lighting the kinara. If you’re still looking for the right gifts to bring some holiday cheer to the STEM and STEAM lovers in your life, check out our engineer-approved 2022 Holiday Gift Guide, which features more than 55 gift ideas ranging from stocking stuffers and STEAM gifts to shirts, glassware, jewelry, toys, and subscription services.
Stocking Stuffers
Know anyone who does some of their best thinking in the shower? We know several STEM folks who do. And if you do too, consider gifting them this well-reviewed waterproof note pad set from Amazon ($13) or Walmart ($10), so they can capture their ideas as they flow under the faucet.
If your brainy recipient also likes to ponder out in nature, or in their lab or garage, you could gift these weatherproof spiral notebooks instead. These notebooks reliably resist water, sweat, grease, and mud and can be written on with an all-weather pen, a pencil, or a crayon when wet and a standard ballpoint pen and permanent marker in addition when dry. They’re available in eight colors and in singles ($5) or in sets of three ($13) or six ($25).
Have a more traditional note taker on your list? If they also have a penchant for vintage tech, they’ll love these hand-bound floppy disk notebooks ($17), and if not, this recycled circuit board notebook might be up their alley ($17).
Looking to treat a proud nerd who also has a good sense of humor? They may enjoy these “The Cow Says Mu,” “I Have Potential,” “Think Like a Proton and Stay Positive,” and “Avoid Negativity” magnets. And if you’re more of a humanities person, you might both get a kick out of the “I’m Good With Math” magnet or this “I do Hard Math” coffee mug ($12). The magnets are all around $4 apiece.
If you’d like to gift more of an everyday use item that will regularly bring you to mind, consider these recycled motherboard badge reels ($29 at Etsy) or a circuit board business card case ($20 for olive green or $37–50 for your choice of standard PCB green, blue, red, or black).
For the tinkerers in your life, this 25-in-one electric screwdriver set for precision electronics ($60) could be a real winner.
“The Way Things Work Now” book ($20) could be excellent brain food for the older and more experienced STEM folks in your life and help bring them up to speed on newer developments ranging from touchscreens to 3D printers.
STEAM Gifts
“Karakuri: How to Make Mechanical Paper Models That Move” ($15) and “Duct Tape Engineer: The Book of Big, Bigger, and Epic Duct Tape Projects” ($11) help encourage STEM minds to engage with the arts in addition to science, technology, engineering, and math and to use both hard and soft skills to solve problems.
The Lix Pen UV ($104) is another great STEAM gift. It’s the smallest circular 3D pen in the world and can be used to create rigid, freestanding structures from a variety of ABS and PLA filaments. The 3Doodler PRO+ 3D printing pen ($200) is a similar professional-grade product. Although larger than the Lix Pen UV, it has a sleeker form factor than many of the made-for-kids options available, and it allows you to draw using six different types of materials: wood, copper, bronze, ABS, PLA, and Nylon.
Shirts
Almost everyone loves a good t-shirt and a groan-worthy joke, and these “Run CNC” ($22+), “May the Force be With You” (16+), “Don’t Want None Unless You Got Bunsen” ($30), and binary language ($13) shirts definitely fit the bill. But we also love these empowering melanated ($23+) and atomic ($22+) “STEMinist” shirts.
Glassware
Etsy has a wide selection of fun science glassware, including stemless wine glasses etched with molecular wine diagrams ($32 for two or $18 for one), pint glasses printed with molecular diagrams of beer ($48 for two), rocks glasses etched with molecular diagrams of whiskey ($32 for two or $18 for one), and this Great Women of Science pint glass ($25). There are also cheeky options, including pint ($22), wine ($20), and rocks glasses ($20) that note that alcohol technically is a solution, and creative options, like this Erlenmeyer flask carafe and beaker glass set (available with one or two glasses for $37 or $42) and these flask glasses with lids and hand-blown glass straws (one for $22 or two for $32).
Jewelry
A lot of STEM-themed jewelry features circuit board designs, like this men’s ring ($183+) or these earrings by CircuitBreakerLabs ($58–115) and Electrickery Art ($50–62). But we also found these DIP switch and gear earrings (both $20).
Toys
Kids aged two to five can use Vtech’s Smart Chart Medical Kit ($20) to explore medical instruments, symptoms, the human body, and health tips and encourages them to care for their friends, family, and toys.
Learning Resources’ Switcheroo Coding Crew ($30), which won a 2022 Toy Insider award in the STEM category and was a 2022 Toy of the Year finalist in the Vehicle Toy of the Year category, teaches kids as young as four to build screen-free STEM, coding, and critical thinking skills.
Kids five and up may enjoy the LeapFrog Magic Adventures Microscope ($63), which functions as a real microscope with 200x magnification for reusable slides or larger samples that can fit in the built-in tray and also includes a quiz game and eight double-sided smart slides that show educational BBC videos about 15 topics including flowers, animals, food, and minerals.
The Osmo Coding Starter Kit for iPads ($50) uses physical coding blocks and coding commands to teach kids ages five to 10 and older about logic, coding fundamentals, programming basics, creative problem solving, listening, critical thinking, observation, and recognition. It can also help kids develop an ear for rhythm, melody, and harmony by experimenting with patterns and loops of more than 300 musical sounds.
“100 Easy STEAM Activities: Awesome Hands-On Projects for Aspiring Artists and Engineers” ($12) is designed to spark curiosity and teach early concepts in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics and is written for kids aged roughly six to 10. Another book, “The Speed of Starlight: An Exploration of Physics, Sound, Light, and Space” ($15) by acclaimed science writer Colin Stuart, is written for slightly older kids (aged roughly eight to 13) and is designed to present physics in a totally new, highly visual, and easy-to-understand way that both captivates and inspires.
STEM- and STEAM-savvy kids aged eight and up may enjoy an app-enabled building and coding robotics kit, like this adaptable robot ($120), robotic dragon ($60), or robotic unicorn ($75). These award-winning kits allow kids to construct codable robots and use coding blocks to program their robots to navigate obstacles, pick up objects, emit light and sound, express personality traits, and even create custom actions.
This age group may also enjoy the award-winning Elenco Snap Circuits electronic exploration kits, which teach kids creative thinking, problem solving, fine motor, and basic electronics skills and don’t require any additional tools. The Snap Circuits Junior kit ($20) comes with parts and instructions for building 101 working electronic circuits and devices, including a musical doorbell, a voice-controlled lamp, and a flying saucer, while the Snap Circuits Classic kit ($54) comes with parts and instructions for building 305 working electronic circuits and devices, including a sound-activated switch and a two-speed fan.
The Makey Makey invention kit ($50) allows kids eight and up to turn anything capable of conducting at least a tiny amount of electricity — including pencil graphite, plants, bananas, ketchup, and much, much more — to become an input device like a keyboard that can be used to type a letter, jump in a video game, take a picture, or play music. Invented at MIT, this award-winning STEAM invention kit encourages kids to both craft and code using only alligator clips and a webpage, and it teaches kids about circuits, user interface designs, and physical computing.
For kids who are more interested in mechanics than electronics, the Klutz brand LEGO Chain Reactions kit ($22), also aimed at kids eight and up, comes with instructions for how to build 10 wacky chain reaction machines and teaches kids about simple machines.
Kids 10 and up may enjoy a motorized Erector Super Construction building set ($79) capable of creating 25 different models, ranging from a motorized crane to a helicopter. And kids ages 12 and up may enjoy building a working miniature replica of a V8 combustion engine ($75), complete with realistic parts including a timing belt, cylinder heads, spark plugs, pistons, and ignition wires.
Gifts That Keep on Giving
Subscription services are prevalent in just about every facet of modern life, and there are now numerous STEM, STEAM, and other educational options for gift recipients of all ages.
Creation Crate offers electronics courses for ages 12 and up and chemistry and engineering courses for ages 10 and up, all of which are available with various project count, subscription periodicity, price point, and bulk buy options. They also offer junior engineering and robotics projects for ages 7–11, priced at roughly $30 and $35–95 apiece, and advanced expansion projects, called Challenger Projects, for $50 to $160 apiece.
KiwiCo offers Tinker Crates with hands-on STEM projects for ages 9–14 as well as craft-centric Maker Crates and science- and engineering-centric Eureka Crates for ages 14–100, both of which offer periodic fun, inspiration, and learning opportunities for people of every age and interest. The Tinker Crates start at $18.50 per month, the Maker and Eureka Crates start at $27 per month, and they all ship free within the U.S.
Skillshare and MasterClass both offer online instruction about a wide variety of topics. Skillshare offers more than 34,000 classes taught by creative experts in subjects ranging from graphic and UI/UX design to content creation, social media, marketing, productivity, and entrepreneurship, and filmmaking, cooking, music, and crafts. Membership is $32 a month or $168 billed annually. MasterClass offers online instruction from recognized industry experts in food, design and style, arts and entertainment, music, business, sports and gaming, writing, science and technology, home and lifestyle, community and government, and wellness and memberships start at $15 a month. Expert instructors in the science and technology realm include Bill Nye, Terence Tao, John Douglas, and Chris Hadfield, while experts in writing include James Patterson and Dan Brown and experts in music include Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey.
Happy Holidays!
We hope our engineer-approved 2022 STEM and STEAM holiday gift guide helped you check a few more people off of your shopping list, and we wish you and yours a safe, healthy, and happy holiday season.
