This coming yuletide season, your kids should get something better than the usual LEGO, Roblox, or iPad. Your future clinical engineers, biochemists, and scientists deserve the best STEM Christmas gifts.
Kids today spend an average of 7.5 hours everyday on gadgets for entertainment. Toddlers as young as 4–5 years old also sit for more than two hours in front of tablets and smartphones daily. How can you help your kids avoid or break this pattern?
The solution is to give them home science experiment tools. These will not only lessen their screen times but also introduce them to various science concepts while having fun as well as help them develop skills like resourcefulness and goal-setting.sts.
THE 8 BEST STEM CHRISTMAS GIFTS FOR YOUR KIDS
You can now shop the best STEM Christmas gifts from our new category, Home Science Tools. Here are eight of our top picks:
1. Compound Microscope
For kids ages 8 and above
This gift-giving season, you can give your little Einstein their very first compound microscope. Our best-selling compound microscope, Omano JuniorScope, offers a high level of magnification compared to regular kids microscopes, is lightweight, and is convenient-to-use making it perfect for kids’ small busy hands. Backed up with highly-rated reviews, it’s one of the best STEM Christmas gifts you can get your kids.
The JuniorScope is a battery-operated compound microscope with high-precision glass optics that can magnify specimens up to 400x. It features LED lighting for the best viewing of flower petals, a strand of hair, a pebble, or any other samples from your backyard that you can get and observe at home.
This microscope also comes with The Amazing Microscope Adventures experiment cards showing activities and experiments you and your kids could try together.
If you want to capture images or record videos of samples under study so your kids can look back at these in the future, you can also get an optional digital camera to go with the JuniorScope.
2. Compound student microscope with a camera
For kids ages 10 and up
A compound student microscope with a camera is more ideal for classroom activities and home experiments. By having a digital camera, it’s easier to take still photos and live videos and upload them on a laptop or online. This makes collaboration with teachers and classmates more convenient as kids can just share their screens if on a Zoom call or share their online drives if doing distance learning.
A perfect digital microscope gift, the OM118-B4SL 40X-1000X LED Compound Student Microscope is an excellent choice for students attending chemistry or biology classes at school or at home. This microscope can magnify up to 1000x and can be used for coaxial coarse and fine focus. Like the JuniorScope, it features LED lighting for easy viewing of samples at any time of the day.
It comes with a 1.3MP Color Digital Camera, the OptixCam Summit K2 Series, which you can connect to the eyepiece using the 23mm adapter. This camera ensures kids view sharper details of coins, hair, rocks, water, or whatever samples they wish to observe.
With the camera and K2View software included in the set, users can effortlessly connect to any computer with a Windows OS. For additional fun, you can also purchase prepared slides and a book guide containing various experiments.
3. Balance scale
For Pre-K kids ages 3 and above
Your young Einstein could start their humble science adventure with a balance scale. It’s one of the most basic and useful STEM Christmas gifts that you can get.
Our Primer Balance Scale by Ohaus is a great choice for young padawans. Kids can learn the basic concepts of mass and measurement by weighing toys, small blocks, books, rocks, and other items they can easily grab at home. This primary scale is made from plastic and weighs only 0.75kg, lighter than the normal balance scales but don’t mistake it as just a “toy”.
The Primer Balance Scale can let your kids measure objects that weigh up to 2 kg. It has two buckets, which two small hands can easily lift even if filled with objects. The scale, meanwhile, has a sliding weight for zero adjustment. It also displays the accurate weight even if objects are not properly placed in the bucket.
4. Science kit for beginners
For kids 8 years old and above
You can do plenty of fun experiments without scientific tools. You can find a lot of those on the internet. But wouldn’t it feel more productive if your kids can learn about how a microscope, magnetic stirrer, graduated cylinder, and other basic lab equipment work? That’s why you should check out our science kit for beginners, the Kids Science Starter Set.
The Kids Science Starter Set has a smart set of tools:
Our Junior Scope Microscope is a real compound microscope—the kind that high school students use—but designed for the small hands of an eight-year-old.
The book, Book: The World Of The Microscope, has hundreds of experiments with clear, easy-to-understand instructions.
You can use our Sci Stir Analog Magnetic Stirrer to quickly stir solutions in beakers.
The graduated cylinders and griffin style beakers come in different sizes. You can measure liquids up to 250mL in the cylinders and contain solutions up to 1000mL in the beakers. Using these beakers, you can teach your kids how to measure volume and the concept of water displacement. You can submerge colorful rocks in a beaker filled with water and show volume of the objects through the water displacement method.
5. Microbiology kit
For kids 5 years old and above
Microbiology is one of the fundamental disciplines of biology. Studying it can help a child understand how organisms like viruses, bacteria, as well as fungi work and live in different environments. Through it, the basic concept of how the Sars-Cov-2 virus can cause diseases such as the highly infectious COVID-19 can be introduced. What’s a better and easier way to learn about these than through a microbiology kit?
Our Microbiology Kit by Omano is one of the most engaging STEM Christmas gifts on this list. This kit includes the tools for creating bacteria cultures such as a pipette, 50 premium blank slides, swabs, petri dishes, well slides, and 100 slide covers. It comes with a 5 gm Nutrient Agar which your kids can use to grow their first fungi or bacteria culture.
Let Kids’ imagination run wild with 5 professionally prepared slides also included in the kit plus a World of Microscope guidebook complete with colorful illustrations and interesting experiments.
6. Adventure Cards - Activities and experiments for kids
For kids ages 5 and above
Are your kids fond of conducting science experiments on their own? You don’t always need to connect to the internet and search YouTube or Google for experiments you can do together. .
Check out the Amazing Microscope Adventure Cards by Omano that kids can carry anywhere and use with or without Wi-Fi. Specially created by microscopy and lab professionals, these cards feature sample activities and experiments perfect to ignite minds of enthusiastic little science geeks..
These adventure cards teach kids how to use a microscope and at the same time introduce simple science experiments. With in-depth but easy to understand instructions, your kids can do these activities whether at home or at school, on their own or with their friends, guaranteed to make way for faster learning. .
7. Hand-held digital microscope
For kids ages 10 and above
Kids in middle school have more hands-on experiments—purifying water, learning about magnetism, and even working with crystals. Teachers might require them to go outside and examine materials like rocks, pebbles, and soil. For activities requiring field work, a hand-held digital microscope would be a nice option.
Our best-selling Dino-Lite Edge Handheld Digital Microscope is a portable microscope your kids can easily carry and use to examine specimens anywhere. It comes with a built-in polarizer, which can minimize glare from reflective surfaces during daytime outdoor activities.
Kids can easily control the brightness of the LEDs using the Flexible Light Control (FLC). With this feature, they won’t need to be in a brightly lit space just to illuminate a material and examine it correctly.
Can your kids use this handheld microscope on their desks at home? Yes, absolutely. The Dino-Lite Edge can be mounted on a tabletop stand for better examinations of samples even at home.
8. Multiparameter pen meter
For kids ages 10 and above
Outside the laboratory, acids and bases play important roles in our everyday lives. For instance, knowing about their differences can help kids learn how stomach acids affect our digestive system or why bleach is effective for disinfecting your house.
If your kid is in elementary or middle school, you can introduce them to the concepts of acids and bases by measuring pH levels of different liquids or solutions in your household. The perfect tool for that would be a multi parameter pen meter.
Our Multi-parameter meter is a portable, battery-operated pen capable of measuring various parameters including pH levels, salinity, and total dissolved solids in samples at a given temperature.
Make your kids feel like they are real scientists by letting them dip the pen meter in a coffee cup, a mug filled with water, or a beaker with dishwashing liquid soap and have them measure pH levels of each solution. Another nice application they can do is to measure TDS levels of saltwater or drinking water, helping them examine whether your drinking water at home is palatable or not.
Make your little Einsteins happy with the best STEM Christmas gifts.
Our team here at Microscope is highly dedicated to providing high-quality research and lab equipment to professionals. In line with that, we also want your kids to learn and develop a love for science while having a lot of fun.
That’s why you should check out any of the best STEM Christmas gifts we listed above. Find what you exactly need from our Home Science Tools page that you can easily navigate by category, age, grade-level, and price. Don’t forget, you can also enjoy FREE shipping for orders over $150.