STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math. People talk about getting their kids interested in STEM for many reasons, and with my oldest two kids, I’ve been successful (my daughters, thus far, are less into STEM; they’re much more into art). I didn’t set out to raise kids “into STEM.” What I did try to do, though, was leave doors open. When one of my kids showed interest in how things worked, I tried to meet that interest where it was, not where I thought it should go.
Looking back, what worked best wasn’t a single program or method, but a series of small, low-pressure exposures over many years.
When my kids were young, it mostly looked like building. A lot of LEGO on the floor. Sometimes it was kits with instructions, but many times it was just piles of pieces that got assembled, collapsed, and rebuilt endlessly. No one was learning engineering terminology, but they were learning something more important: that structures behave differently depending on how you put them together.
Around the same time, we had Snap Circuits in the house. Those were great for kids who liked seeing immediate results. You connect a few pieces, press a switch, and something lights up or spins. Change one part and the whole thing behaves differently. There’s no lecture attached to that. The learning happens because kids notice patterns on their own.
As they got a bit older, some of my kids started gravitating toward screen-based activities that were still quietly teaching logic. We used things like Hour of Code when they were curious but not ready to commit to anything long-term. It worked well because it felt like solving a puzzle, not taking a class. They were telling characters where to go, figuring out why something didn’t work, and adjusting their approach until it did.
Later on, interactive coding environments like those on Khan Academy became useful for the kids who liked tinkering digitally. They could change a line of code and instantly see how it affected an animation or game. If it broke, they fixed it. If it didn’t behave the way they expected, they experimented. That feedback loop mattered more than any formal lesson.
Minecraft was another big one in our house. At first, it was just building. Then Redstone entered the picture, and suddenly kids were creating systems that only worked if events happened in the right order. Doors that opened conditionally. Mechanisms that failed if one piece was off. From the outside, it looked like a game. From the inside, they were learning sequencing, logic, and problem-solving in a very real way.
There were also phases where my kids were drawn to games built around real physics. One that stuck with us was Scrap Mechanic. In it, kids design vehicles and machines and then immediately see what happens when physics is involved. If the weight distribution is wrong, the vehicle flips. If there isn’t enough power, it doesn’t move. Nothing is explained upfront. The rules are just there, and kids learn by testing assumptions and redesigning when those assumptions fail. For some of my kids, that kind of trial-and-error learning was where abstract ideas finally clicked.
At different points, we looked into more structured group experiences, such as LEGO robotics clubs, but we were without a car then, and getting my kids to where those clubs were wasn’t possible, though I’m sure they would have loved it. There was also a science camp in the nearby city called Hacker Camp that didn’t work out for other reasons, but many people I know send their kids there and love it.
As my kids reached their teen years, interests naturally narrowed. Some drifted away from STEM entirely, and that was fine. Others wanted depth. Two of my sons joined a national cyber program focused on real-world problem solving. For my eldest, that path eventually led to working in the high-tech field, where he’s been for the past year, and he’ll soon be drafting into the cyber unit of our local army. That outcome wasn’t something I could have engineered early on. It grew out of years of curiosity, experimentation, and choosing to go deeper when it felt right to him. My second son is in his second year of the program and doing really well; we’ll see what the future holds for him in terms of STEM.
What all of this taught me is that interest doesn’t need to be manufactured. It needs room. Games that reward experimentation, tools that allow failure, and experiences that kids can opt into, and out of, without pressure made the biggest difference in our home.
STEM, for us, wasn’t a straight line. It was a series of invitations. Some were accepted. Some weren’t. And in the long run, that flexibility mattered far more than any specific resource ever did.
