15 Brilliant STEM Gifts For 8 Year Old Boys

Boys just like gross things sometimes! Whether that’s squishing bugs outside or making dirt pies, there doesn’t seem to be a consistent reason as to why that is. If you want to take their love of things squishy and gross, you should check out this toy. It’s a squishy human body that comes with 21 removable organs! Along with all the different body parts, it includes a set of tweezers, an organization mat, and an anatomy book. It is super fun to learn the different organs as well as play a part in scooping them out with a pair of tweezers.

Every kid goes through a geology phase. It usually comes right after learning that they could potentially find dinosaur bones in their backyards. With this National Geographic kit, you can ensure they are rewarded with some treasure after their hard work. This kit has 10 geodes, as well as all the related paraphernalia you might need to get them open. A geode is a rock that has crystals hidden inside, and they are a naturally occurring thing! These ones can be smashed open with a hammer to reveal some truly stunning crystals.

Learning through hands-on experience is essential for most boys. The Elenco snap kit is a great way to learn just how circuits work! This junior board is designed to teach kids how electricity and circuit boards work. The kit includes over 30 electric parts that can be assembled in whichever way you want, allowing your kid to create their own custom-designed boards! It has an instruction manual to teach the basics of how things work, and it doesn’t require any tools to get started. Soon your kid will be making iPhones in their spare time!

Space, rockets, and flying things – all essential for an eight-year-old! The Original Rocket kit is perfect for kids who love building things and watching them in action. The kit includes four rockets that attach to a ground-mounted launchpad. With a stomp on the yellow foot-launcher, the rockets on the pad will fly into the sky! Depending on how hard they stomp, the rockets can reach a maximum of 200 feet in the air. This kit, in particular, is designed after a “duel”, letting two kids compete and see who can get a rocket to go higher.

The earth is truly an amazing place. It isn’t always obvious, especially when most of us are insulated by our homes and drive through city blocks without anything all that interesting. With television and toys like this, however, the world becomes magical and scientific, all at the same time! This earth science kit is made for experimenting. It has crystals, tools, and chemical reactions that are as fun as they are informative. Through play, your boy will learn about minerals, the earth, and how some chemicals interact with each other. This is the precursor to having the best display at the science fair in middle school!

Seeing what something looks like 1000x zoomed in isn’t just cool for kids, it’s cool for adults, too! This home microscope is the perfect thing to have in the home when you have an inquisitive and smart boy. It comes with its own slide-making kit, allowing you to take anything you find in the house or yard and put it on display! It is designed to be sturdy (for kids) and is fully metal. It can go from 40x magnification all the way to 1000x magnification. To give some context, you only need 400x to see bacteria swimming. 1000x and you can see them in detail!

The night sky has been fascinating humans for thousands of years. Odds are, your kid is fascinated by it as well. It is something that humanity has shared in an unchanging way as far back as history goes. With the Gskyer telescope, your boy can see details of that sky in a way he could only dream of. This kit comes with a few lenses you can switch out as well as a wireless remote to take photos with. It can be used in combination with a phone to see what the telescope sees on a screen! The aluminum tripod is great as a durable base and allows free rotation as you watch the night sky.

Educational toys nowadays are usually designed in conjunction with modern technology that most kids have. As wild as it sounds, smartphones and tablets are pretty accessible for most kids! The Osmo Genius Starter Kit is a learning kit designed to work with an iPad. The kit helps your boy learn and get ahead as he plays games. It’s like sneaking vegetables into food in a way they can’t taste! It has a few pieces like geometric cubes and letter/number tiles that are picked up by the Osmo camera that attaches to the iPad. It creates an immersive learning experience as the tablet reacts to them touching the pieces in real-time!

Watching scientific experiments is about as exciting as things can get. The only thing better is doing them yourself! With the National Geographic kit, your kid can be a part of the experiments at home safely. The kit comes with 10 experiments that are all different. Some change the color of water, and others magically create snow out of nothing! For a kid, it’s basically magic in their hands. That wonder won’t be forgotten as they grow up and start finding hobbies they enjoy. They will always remember the fun they had doing science experiments!

Legos are about as ubiquitous a toy for boys as anything ever was – this kit just happens to have some awesome science bits that make it a lot more educational than your average Lego set! This Lego kit comes with 11 different machines, some practical and useful, others… not so much! It has 58 different elements that all go into creating the different machines. Like most Lego kits, it requires some creative thinking to make the different objects and put the various pieces together. It promotes creativity and encourages rational development as they figure out how to build everything!

If you’ve never heard of a gravity maze, this might be the kit for you to check out! We’ve all used a pen to trace our way out of a paper maze before, but a gravity maze is 3-d and vertical! The ThinkFun maze uses a set of blocks with differing openings to direct a marble as it falls. By stacking the blocks, you end up creating a little maze for the ball to travel through. It is a fun brain-teaser and sure to garner hundreds of hours of usage. It also comes with a design guide and marbles to use in the mazes. With a quick drop of a marble, you can watch it tumble and fall through the tunnels you just constructed.

Before you go and think this is some Breaking Bad joke for kids, it’s actually an awesome science experiment! This kit is designed to allow kids to grow their own colored crystals and light them up for some awesome light shows. It’s SUPER scientific and the process of watching them grow is really fun and rewarding to be a part of. Like a real chemist, your kid will mix all the ingredients and place them in a special container to grow. In the meantime, they can read up on crystal formation with the included booklet! When everything is done, pull them out, put them on a USB-powered base, and see them glow!

Getting hands-on with stuff is always an awesome way to learn! Part of how you learn is through trial and error. What better method to use than the Scientific Method! This book teaches all about the scientific method in a way that makes sense to little minds. It also includes some hands-on experiments involving things that are usually around the house. Baking soda and vinegar rocket, anyone? Packed with over 100 experiments and a ton of information on science and how things work, this is a perfect book for the inquisitive mind of a boy who loves science and the world around him.

Dinosaurs are the best thing in the world for an eight-year-old boy! While they may do their best to try and find bones in the backyard, it isn’t all that likely. You can help them to still find treasure, however, with the Dig-a-Dozen Dino kit! This kit features twelve different dino eggs that contain a unique baby dino toy. The kit comes with the 12 “fossilized” eggs and all the tools needed to crack them open and find the treasure waiting inside. On top of the eggs, the kit also includes identification cards so you can see exactly which dinosaurs were found inside each egg.

What pairs better than candy and science? Nothing! The Playz Edible Candy kit is the perfect way to engage with your sciency-minded kid while also having a sweet treat as a reward! The kit comes with over 40 different experiments to make, all of them edible. In real life, making candy is ALL about science! Whether it’s jellies, sugar crystals, or chocolates, there is a fun science element that goes on in every candy shop across the world. Using the Playz kit, you can bring a bit of that edible fun home. Apart from all the edible bits and ingredients, the box also includes the directions for making everything, as well as some special tools.