Looking for the best monthly science kits for kids? In the guide below, we’ll detail some of our absolute favorite STEM kits that will get your kids excited about science and technology. We’ll go over what they contain, their age range recommendations, the benefits of each kit, and more!
Are you struggling to make your child avoid screens? Do you also run out of ideas when planning productive activities for them? Are your children bored of all the same old games every day?
We have the perfect solution for you and your kids: monthly STEM subscription boxes!
With children being exceedingly drawn toward screens and mindless games, it has become more important than ever to get your children involved in interesting activities that boost their critical thinking and are productive yet fun exercises.
The best monthly science kits for kids consist of several DIY projects that keep your child hooked for the entire month. The best thing about these activities is not only that they’re delightful, but they also improve creativity, teach important concepts, and make your child familiar with many subjects that aren’t a part of conventional academics.
Here’s a list of the best STEM subscription boxes to help you get your monthly surprises right away…
Disclosure: Some of the links in this article are affiliate links, meaning at no additional cost for you, we might get a commission if you click the link and purchase.
What are the Best Monthly Science & STEM Kits for Kids?
1. Best Overall: KiwiCo
KiwiCo| Tinker. Create. Innovate. With hands-on projects that make learning fun!
KiwiCo makes STEM learning fun and exciting for kids, while taking the prep and planning off your plate. With themed crates that arrive at your doorstep every month, three months, or six months.
The best part about this particular science subscription box is that it caters to all age groups, making it a popular pick amongst people with multiple kids.
Whether you have an infant or a teenager, KiwiCo has awesome projects which both can have fun with; either together, separately, or even with you!
All the activities are way different, so getting bored is out of the question.
Some kits explore the world of Arts and Crafts, such as the Maker crate, while others focus on teaching you things about Geography and Culture, like their popular Atlas Crate.
With KiwiCo, your kids will enjoy a highly entertaining and knowledgeable experience that will keep them fully engaged and entertained each month.
Key Features & Benefits
- Varied activities
- Crates can be switched at anytime
- Subscription is highly economical and more reliable than purchasing the crates individually
- Every crate follows a different genre, allowing you to cater to multiple children and their preferences
- Promotes critical thinking and develops intelligence
- The crates contain all the material and guides required to carry out different projects and also have video tutorials that help you get through the process smoothly
Pricing
KiwiCo pricing starts at $23.95/month for most kits.
2. Best for Tweens: MelScience
Tailored for kids between 10-14 years of age, MelScience provides a slightly advanced level of projects. Their subscription boxes for kids have a variety of scientific experiments that may need some supervision but are great to bond with your child.
With the MelScience stem kit for kids, your child can have an excellent experience learning about workings such as Alchemy, Sound waves, Aerodynamics, Electrostatics, Thermal Effects, etc.
This science box for kids can be a great way of spending time with your children. The challenging nature of the projects develops your child’s curiosity and sparks a sense of determination.
Key Features & Benefits
- Augmented reality projects
- Special access to interactive lessons by competent teachers
- Helps improve academic performance
- Experiments are entirely safe to execute
- Play-time inculcates academic learning
- All lab equipment is included in the kit.
- A free VR headset to link your smartphones and truly experience science coming to life
Pricing
MelScience subscriptions start at $29.90/month.
3. Best for Self-Learning: Spangler Science Club
As a parent, you must’ve heard of Steve Spangler, and this is the unique part of this particular science box for kids: the popular TV host, along with a team of professionals, has designed a series of science experiments that are bound to keep your child engaged.
This kit is structured for kids ages 7-14 and offers slightly challenging projects. Your child can have a fun-filled goofy day with Slime Art and can be making a circuit the next day. Seeing your kids around test tubes and chemicals might worry you at some point but pay no heed, for this kit is designed to be safe for independent learning.
Key Features & Benefits
- Independent learning will make children smarter and self-sufficient.
- Experiment guides help children carry out the process on their own
- The projects are tailored so that children can explore their results even further without much assistance.
- Because of the age range, if you get a subscription for your child, it is likely to last you up until his teens, thereby making it a productive and long-term investment.
Pricing
Subscription starts at $24.99/month.
4. Best For Programming: Bitsbox
Designed by two Google employees keen on teaching coding to kids, this science subscription box is just the right thing for your computer geeks!
The kit takes you through developing personalized apps that your child can play with later. How cool is that?
The box aims explicitly to bridge the gap between physical activities and screens, making your child experience a healthy balance of both. Each month, the box has several projects that give your child new coding skills upon completion.
Key Features & Benefits
- Plenty of coding projects every month
- Caters to ages 6-12
- A hands-on experience in coding real-time apps
- Online projects
- Developed apps by children can be shared with anyone and anywhere
Pricing
Subscription starts at $23.76/month.
5. Best for Nature Lovers: Green Kid Crafts
As the name suggests, this science subscription box is all about sustainability and eco-friendly projects. Targeting kids aged 2-10+, this box is your best friend when inculcating environment-responsive ideas amongst children. The most beneficial part of this kit is that, along with making your children green advocates, it also provides them with projects for other subjects such as science, math, and engineering. Your children will not only be making bird feeders by themselves but also be introduced to rocket science and how to make a robot.
This kit stands out amongst all the others because all the material included in the box is eco-friendly and because the officials plant a tree with every purchase. It’s an excellent option if your kid is a nature lover!
Key Features & Benefits
- Inculcates a sense of responsibility
- Encourages empathy towards animals and nature
- Learning about sustainability through fun activities
- It brings art and science together
- Makes children aware of environmental do’s and don’ts
Pricing
Subscription starts at $28.95/month.
6. Best For Learning Electronics: Creation Crate
Have children who are fascinated by electronic gadgets? We have the perfect way of keeping them busy: Creation Crate.
Ideally structured for teenagers, this crate provides a hands-on experience of working around, Electronics, Chemistry, and Mechatronics. The kit is named so because they actually want your kids to ‘create’ things.
This kit is sure to get your child’s brain whizzing from building a mood lamp to creating weather stations that calculate temperatures and wind pressures.
As the subscription progresses, the nature of the projects gets more challenging, keeping it interesting till the end. This means that you can join in with your kids and double the fun!
Key Features & Benefits
- Improve analytical reasoning
- Introduces children to coding and helps them master the skill
- Introduces real-world learning
- · Teaches children how to build personalized electronic equipment
- Gives a hands-on insight into engineering concepts
Pricing
The subscription starts at $29.99 per project.
7. Best for Sensory and Motor Skills: Genius Box
This science box for kids primarily focuses on developing a passion for learning and brain development. According to research, it is said that learning is most successful when children are allowed to explore and experiment freely. Their targeted age group is children between 3-11 years of age, and their mission is to get the children enthusiastic about learning through play.
They have theme-based activities, which give you an edge if you have preferential kids. Each kit has multiple projects, puzzles, games, etc., that keep children busy for hours.
This kit is specifically great for improving your child’s cognitive development, logical thinking, and imagination.
The projects involve exploring Rainbow Art, Rocket Mosaic Art, Robotics, Forensics, etc.
Key Features & Benefits
- Provides a hands-on experience in art forms that aren’t conventional
- Develops sensory and motor skills
- Provides Language Development at early stages
- Caters to curious minds in an engaging way
- Has a number of themes
- The kit has all the materials required for different activities that can be reused.
Pricing
Subscription starts at $29/month.
8. Best For Family Projects: Stem Discovery Boxes
The Stem Discovery Boxes are great if your family time is boring and unproductive. Although it’s designed for children between 7-12 years of age, its projects and activities are also worthwhile for adults.
The best part about this kit is that whether you are around or not, tweens can figure their way out pretty easily through their manuals and guides. Younger kids might need a bit of supervision, but it’s safe to say that you will be fully immersed before you know it!
Their projects are centered on a vast range of subjects, including physics, mathematics, electronics, coding, and much more!
Key Features & Benefits
- Multiple experiments that allow children to freely explore
- Academic learning simultaneous to playtime
- 3 projects in each monthly box
- Can engage the entire family with children
- Stimulates creative brain cells
- Each project keeps children engaged for days at a time
Pricing
Subscriptions start at $24.95/month
9. Best For Future Scientists: Club SciKidz Lab Box
This is our favorite pick for all the young children who aspire to pursue careers in science. The unique part of this monthly science kit is that every box highlights one specific scientific career. This means that one month your child may be diving deep into veterinary sciences, and the other month, he will be exploring planets and space. While its recommended age group is 5-12, this kit is particularly beneficial for tweens because it gives them an insight into multiple career options very early in life. Their career choice becomes logical after playing with Club Scikids because they already have a hands-on experience with different fields and can choose what they would like best.
Key Features & Benefits
- Highly exploratory
- Contains buildable projects
- Takes kids to experiment with both scientific reality and fiction
- Allows kids to build their personalized laboratories.
- It also has camps along with the same themes.
Pricing
Subscriptions start at $39.95/month.
What Is A STEM Subscription Box?
A STEM subscription box is a monthly solution for keeping your kids engaged in productive, educational, hands-on activities.
To put it simply, they are plain boxes that are filled with educational activities and experiments. These activities aim to dissolve the barrier between academics and play by merging both of them.
This means that your child can spend hours playing, and it can still be beneficial for him in terms of academics.
Students are burdened with academics in the conventional setting and often struggle to keep up. STEM deals with all these issues through a fun teaching approach for kids. This allows them to have a balanced relationship with academics and playtime and teaches them things about subjects that are not conventionally taught at a young level, such as Astronomy and forensics.
Why Use STEM Subscription Boxes for Kids?
STEM teaches kids several skills that are often not even heard of. They not only focus on studying things on paper but also teach children how to apply these learnings in the real world. This makes kids more self-sufficient and raises new leaders for the future.
The best part about STEM-based education is that there is no right or wrong way.
As long as you’re learning, you can take up studying Forensics alongside Physics, a perk that is usually not available in mainstream educational institutes.
Your kid doesn’t have to give up on his Art and Crafts to memorize chemical compositions because STEM offers a balanced plan for both.
This becomes highly beneficial in the long run because kids don’t get burdened by academic stress and are free to explore their potential to the fullest. Below are some skills inculcated by STEM:
Keeping Up with the 21st Century
The 21st Century has vastly progressed in scientific development, and it has become ever more critical for our kids to keep up with this advancement. The era of studying only through books and the whiteboard is long gone. STEM inculcates skills in your children that help them navigate through new technologies. You might not know how a robot functions, but ask your STEM-educated kid, and he’d build up a custom robot right in front of your eyes.
Mental Development
Motor skills, the intricacy of craft, critical thinking, imaginative skills, analytics, logical thinking, and cognitive learning are just some of the skills instilled into children by STEM. These skills prepare them well for their life ahead and make them sensible individuals.
Innovation
The one thing that your child is sure to have after pursuing a STEM-led education is innovative skills. STEM students are never shy of putting their ideas onto the table and are even more passionate about implementing them in real life. This means that the days of underconfident kids are long gone because a fun-based education enables your child to spread his wings and grace the world with outstanding ideas and solutions.
Problem Solving
The best thing about STEM kids is that they learn never to give up. It prepares your child to figure out ways out of any problems they might face. Whether it’s a faulty material or an unsuccessful idea, you can count on them to never stop pushing until they succeed!
A Final Word on the Best Monthly Science Boxes for Kids
There are lots of great science subscription boxes for kids out there, and many of them do a great job of educating your children in STEM.
Our personally recommended science and STEM subscription box would, of course, be KiwiCo.
The primary reason it has our preference is its versatility. It caters to all age groups — from younger children to bigger kids (and adults with childlike wonder!) — so you can even get a subscription just for yourself. Yes, when we say all age groups, we mean that the said science box for kids can be worthwhile for you, too!
The wide variety of crates cater to all kinds of interests – whether you want to explore cooking or get deep into the world of science and engineering, KiwiCo has got you covered and they make learning fun.
As they call themselves, the ‘innovation factory’ is a one-stop-shop for making your child a successful innovator and a logical problem-solver.
KiwiCo prepares your child to be a brighter version of themselves every day; their crates can keep your child immersed for the entire month until the next subscription arrives.
You also can switch crates anytime you wish, which means that you needn’t worry if your child changes interests after a few months. A perfect choice for all parents, this monthly subscription will amaze you and your children!
Click here to get started with KiwiCo.
Have any questions about monthly science kits for kids? Leave a comment below and we’ll help you out.
