Although learning a true programming language isn’t something I’d expect a kid to pick up until they’re a bit older, they can start learning the principles of coding at a pretty early age — and you don’t even need a computer to do it! The Botley 2.0 robot, for example, promises to teach kids as young as five how to code through 100% screen-free play.

Sure, it’s nothing so fancy as smart companions like Cozmo and Loona, but Botley is plenty clever enough for young’uns.

It comes as part of a 46-piece or 78-piece activity set, both of which include a remote control used to program actions, two detachable faceplates with robot arms, 40 coding cards, and a coding starter guide. The larger set adds 6 double-sided tiles and 27 obstacle building pieces.

Botley can be “coded” to move in six directions, play music, follow a ‘track’ of black electrical tape, light up in the dark, play memory games with you, and it can even pretend to be a train, a police car, a ghost, or a dozen other things.

Up to 150 steps can be programmed into an action sequence, so there’s plenty to keep your bright young coder busy as they learn creative problem solving and computational thinking skills.

Get the Botley 2.0 46-piece set for $64 or the 78-piece set for $81. There’s also a classroom bundle for $269 that combines several robot + accessory sets into one teacher-friendly package.

Buy Now

Although I turn 39 next month, I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like I don’t still love a simple PB&J sandwich now and again, just like when I was a kid. I’m also not above buying boxes of Uncrustables to pack in the lunches we take on family outings, because they’re just so easy and convenient.

However, the price of those things has gotten a bit out of hand in recent years, to the point where I have a hard time justifying the purchase anymore. But not to worry, there are specialized gizmos called “sandwich sealers” that let you make your own crustless sandwich pockets at home!

With the HiYZ Sandwich Sealer, all you have to do is place down a typical-sized slice of bread, place whatever filling(s) you want in the center, cover with another slice of bread, and press down hard. Voilà, the sandwich pocket is created and you simply pop it out from the surrounding crust (which you can eat right there or save for something else, like making breadcrumbs or stuffing).

This thing opens up so many doors compared to buying actual Uncrustables. You can use whatever kind of bread you like, you get to choose the fillings (how about healthier and preservative-free?) and adjust their ratios, and you always have the option of making savory sandwiches intended to be grilled or air fried later.

But mainly, if Uncrustables have ever been a part of your grocery budget, the savings alone is arguably the most appealing factor in all of this

Get the HiYZ sandwich cutter & sealer for just $10 on Amazon.

Buy Now

PicassoTiles’ magnetic marble run sets combine two of my favorite kinds of toys for kids: marble runs and magna-tiles.

Based on that info alone, I’m sure you can guess how it works — constructing marble run towers using magnetic tiles and track pieces, through which you can propel a series of specially made weighted magnetic marbles. I like that those marbles are oversized, and thus less likely to be choking hazards.

The sets come in a few sizes: 50-piece, 70-piece, 100-piece, and 120-piece.

Buy Now

Have your kids watched you making espresso and wanted to join in the fun, but you don’t really want them operating your expensive, delicate equipment? Well, maybe this toy is the answer.

Designed to look just like the De’Longhi La Specialista espresso machine, Casdon’s barista-style coffee machine toy will keep your little ones entertained for hours as they mimic the processes of pulling shots, brewing americanos, and steaming milk for cappuccinos — all while the machine makes realistic coffee brewing sounds.

I personally appreciate that the accessories stash away on the back side of the machine when playtime’s over:

You can get this awesome espresso toy for $34 on Amazon. You’ll need to provide a couple AAA batteries of your own though.

Buy Now

In 2004, a few years before the launch of the original iPhone, the devices being confiscated in classrooms the world over were the Tamagotchi Connection series of digital pets, which could interact with one another via infrared in order to become friends, play games, and even give birth to offspring.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of that original release, Bandai is about to relaunch the Tamagotchi Connection family, now with revamped programming but much of the same nostalgic gameplay that allows you to set up play dates, gift exchanges, and more between multiple Tamas.

The new Tamagotchi Connection releases on July 10th, 2024 and can be pre-ordered for $30 on Amazon in your choice of Bubbles, Ice Cream, Rainbow Sky, or Clear Retro shell designs. They also have a Blue and Pink Grafitti matching two-pack for $58.

Buy Now

⤷ ️ Filed under: “As seen on Shark Tank”

Have you ever wanted to learn how to crochet but you’re not sure where to start? Or do you have a kid who’s expressed such an interest? Then you should have a look at The Woobles, a series of fun beginner kits that come with everything you need to create amigurumi, i.e. small yarn plushies:

Amigurumi is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small, stuffed yarn creatures. The word is a compound of the Japanese words 編み ami, meaning “crocheted or knitted,” and 包み kurumi, literally “wrapping,” as in 縫い包み nuigurumi “stuffed doll.” Amigurumi vary in size and there are no restrictions about size or look.

Beginners can choose from a number of cute little plushie pals to create:

• Pierre the Penguin
• Sebastian the Lion
• Felix the Fox
• Fred the Dinosaur
• Bjørn the Narwhal
• JoJo the Bunny
• Kiki the Chick

Each one comes with something they call “Easy Peasy” yarn, a smooth medium-weight (#4) yarn that makes it easy to see your stitches as you go.

If you’ve got absolutely zero experience crocheting, that’s okay because the beginner kits offer clear step-by-step directions (for both left- and right-handed users!) and easy-to-follow patterns, and they even pre-start the yarn so you can jump right into the fun part of the project.

If you do happen to make a mistake along the way, they make it simple to start over: just tug on the yarn connected to the yarn ball to reset to the pre-started piece.

Once you’ve completed one (or a few) of the beginner kits and you’re ready to try your hand at slightly more complicated projects, you can pick up their 21 giftable-pattern book and fine-tune your crocheting abilities some more.

It’s never too late to learn a new skill, so check out the full collection of beginner Woobles kits and pick the one that speaks to you most.

Buy Now

I don’t know about you guys, but my kids can be real trash goblins on car rides. Despite our best efforts to have them hand us whatever bits of trash they have so we can put them in a bag up front, I will occasionally peer into the backseat and wonder how on earth they’ve still managed to turn it into a warzone.

To keep things simpler, I’ve decided they need to have their own trash bags within arm’s reach. These nylon trash bins from HOTOR are just the thing. They hang on the backs of our headrests and have a top opening where trash can be slotted in as needed, and there are little storage pockets on the sides where they can stash unopened snacks and whatnot.

The interiors are waterproof and don’t leak, so even if kids are tossing in juice boxes that haven’t been 100% consumed, you don’t have to worry about it making a mess underneath. While the company does sell their own trash bags to go with the bins, I find that grocery bags work just as well. Either way, the bags are held up by magnetic snaps around the rim, so swapping out bags is super easy.

The trash bins come in 2-gallon ($13) and 3-gallon ($19) sizes, both of which have a number of color options to choose from.

Buy Now

Today’s neat find are these “Sprout” wood-cased pencils, which offer an eco-friendly alternative to wasteful plastic pens and mechanical pencils. They’re made from certified and sustainably harvested wood to ensure they’re carbon neutral, and each one is tipped with a decomposable cellulose capsule containing non-GMO seeds for various herbs, flowers, vegetables, or trees.

When you’re done with a given pencil, you can plant it upside-down in a pot filled with soil. After a few weeks of regular watering, you should see sprouts starting to grow!

This is a fantastic way to get kids thinking about the products they use in a more cyclical, minimum-waste fashion. ♻️

You can buy Sprout pencils in various amounts and seed types:

• Various packs of 5 ($10–$12 each) with different seed choices
• Various packs of 8 ($15–$16 each), also with different seed choices
• Pack of 12 ($22) that includes seeds for thyme, sage, daisy, basil, melon and forget-me-not
• Pack of 32 ($50) that includes seeds for sage, thyme, carnation, chia, coriander, daisy, forget-me-not, and basil
• Pack of 100 ($135) that contains 25 sage seeds, 25 thyme seeds, 25 forget-me-not seeds, and 25 basil seeds.

They also offer colored pencils that kids will love all the more.

Buy Now

I’m always down for a good globe, particularly one with a unique hook that sets it apart from most others. This light-up globe from USA Toyz is exactly the type of thing I like.

During the day, you can use it like a typical globe, with color-coded countries/states, major cities, capitals, waterways, and other natural features clearly marked around the world. ☀️

At night however, you can switch on the inner LED backlight to turn it into a map of the stars, with all 88 officially recognized constellations denoted, along with planets from our solar system, navigational lines, and major stars. ✨

It’s a really cool effect, and not only is it a great educational tool for kids, it also makes a fantastic night light for them to fall asleep with.

The 7.2″ diameter globe is $40 on Amazon, while the 9″ diameter one is $65.

Buy Now

At the intersection of modern innovation and childhood nostalgia, you’ll find the PowerUp 4.0, a fun and innovative kit that lets your imagination literally take flight, allowing you to turn a humble self-made paper airplane into a smartphone-controlled flying machine!

This STEM-friendly gizmo + mobile app combo started out as a Kickstarter project in 2013 and has seen continuous refinements ever since.

With the release of version 4.0 in 2019, the kit added an onboard flight computer, two new sensors (gyro and accelerometer), two high-speed motors, an autopilot assist function that works with just about any plane design, better durability, and auto-looping trick capabilities.

On top of being a thrilling toy to play with, it’s a fantastic teaching tool that inspires kids to explore the principles of aerodynamics, engineering, and experimentation. After their first flight, they’re bound to be hooked, testing and comparing multiple plane designs to find out which are the most stable and efficient, as well as customizing flight controls in the app to get the best results in each case.

Get the PowerUp 4.0 kit for $70 on Amazon and enjoy the endless opportunities for creativity and exploration in the world of flight ✈️

Buy Now

As a kid, I was a huge fan of the choose-your-own-adventure-style Give Yourself Goosebumps offshoot of the original Goosebumps series. There was just something so fun about exploring all the different ways you could navigate a single story, even if most of the endings were dreadful.

If you’re also intrigued by that idea but aren’t too thrilled about handing your little one a bunch of horror stories, then maybe you’ll find the STEM-friendly Search for a Giant Squid: Pick Your Path more appealing.

Written by Amy Seto Forrester and illustrated by her brother Andy Chou Musser, Search for a Giant Squid is a bit like an educational video game in book form. You take on the role of a teuthologist — a scientist who specifically studies cephalopods, sometimes from the safety of a submersible (alliteration!) — looking for an elusive giant squid in its native habitat: the ocean’s Twilight Zone.

You start by choosing a vehicle, a pilot, and a dive site, and from there you get to navigate your way through an educational deep-sea expedition where every available path leads to a different outcome.

This is one of those books a curious young mind will want to flip through over and over again, choosing different paths each time and always learning something intereseting along the way. It’s also the first of what will apparently be a series, with a second book all about fungi planned for release sometime in 2024.

Get the book in these formats:

• Hardcover ($14) ← recommended
• Kindle ($8)
• Apple Books ($8)

Buy Now

Brand new for 2024 — and released alongside a whole bunch of other awesome sets in the past couple days — LEGO’s new Modular Space Station (model# 60433) is perfect for kids who love outer space and imagining sci-fi adventures.

The station itself is essentially an “orbiting” anchor ring that a series of detailed room pods and other spacecraft can dock with.

The room modules include a science lab, a kitchen, a repair workshop, sleeping quarters, and a biodome, all of which can be moved around and arranged as desired. In terms of spacecraft, you get a space bike and a shuttle ship, the latter of which can become the head of a “space train” made up of the room pod modules linked together.

Of course, none of this would make much sense if there weren’t astronauts aboard to fly the ships and keep things working, so six crew member minifigs are included.

What’s more, the set makes use of LEGO’s “Airlock” system — i.e. the orange door pieces — to connect with other space-themed sets, like the also-new Command Rover and Crane Loader (model# 60432) and the Space Base and Rocket Launchpad (model# 60434).

Get the Modular Space Station LEGO set for $110 on Amazon.

Buy Now

Despite the very small space we live in, having music instruments around the home is a big deal for me and my wife. We’ve both seen how important it is for kids to grow up in a place where music is always around, especially if they’re the ones playing it.

The trick for us is to find instruments that don’t take up a lot of room. Things like ukuleles and kalimbas are obvious choices, but what about learning via piano? It’s surely the single best way to pick up concepts of music theory like chords, progressions, scales, etc…but how to fit one in here?

After some searching, we discovered this folding piano keyboard and realized it was the perfect thing for our kids. It offers the functionality you’d expect from a full-sized keyboard — various demo tracks to play along with, lots of instrument tones, just as many backing rhythms, recording functionality, and so on — but then it folds in half for easy storage!

We like that it came with so many little accessories, like a carrying case, a sustain foot pedal, a music sheet stand and clip, a pair of little headphones for private playing, and more. It can also be connected to a computer or smartphone via USB or Bluetooth, and works with piano learning/recording apps like POP Piano, Perfect Piano, and Garageband.

Pick up this travel-friendly beginner’s keyboard piano for $116 on Amazon.

Buy Now

One of the shared gifts our kids received for Christmas this year was a copy of Sushi Go!, a fun card game our family’s been having a blast playing together. It’s also been making me super hungry for dim sum

The basic gist is, you and the other players pass around hands of sushi-themed cards, each person laying a card face-down and revealing it each turn, with the hopes of assembling the highest-scoring combination of sushi dishes by the end of the round (when all the cards are used up).

Every card type has a unique set of conditions and/or point values. For example…

• Playing a single dumpling earns only 1 point, but as you play them in multiples, the point values grow in larger increments (1 → 3 → 6 → 10 → 15 points).
• Meanwhile, sashimi rolls have no value individually, but if you manage to play a set of three (which is easily blocked by another player who sees what you’re trying to set up), you get 10 points.
• Chopsticks earn no points at all, but can be used to play two cards at once on a later turn, allowing for big plays to swing the game in your favor.
• Alone, wasabi does nothing, but place a nigiri (worth 1, 2, or 3 points) on top of it and you triple its value.
• …and the list goes on.

This guy’s 5-minute video gives a great rundown of the game rules:

The game is very approachable and easy to get into, and the game’s whole design aesthetic is cute so it doesn’t feel intimidating for little ones like our 4yo daughter. It also goes by relatively quickly, so you don’t have to dedicate an entire evening if you don’t want to.

However, because the hands are always being passed around, and because you can predict future plays being set up early by your opponents, there’s this whole other level of strategy you can get into that involves 1) remembering who is holding what, 2) when a particular card might come back to you, and 3) possible chances to block someone else from pulling off a devastating combo (at the risk of stalling your own progress).

This is a great little card drafting game that I highly recommend for any family or friend group. Get it for just $12 on Amazon.

Buy Now

A couple years ago, I wrote about a series of anatomically accurate jigsaw puzzles that fit together into one giant cross-section model of the human body. If you (or your science-minded kid) liked those puzzles, you’ll be glad to know they have another series of them that focuses in on five specific parts of the body:

• The Human Brain ($24)
• The Human Eye ($24)
• The Human Feet ($24)
• The Human Hands ($24)
• The Human Heart ($24)

Like the previous set, these educational puzzles feature stunning artwork by Johns Hopkins University-certified medical illustrator Mesa Schumacher. As you build them, you’ll marvel at all the details and the complex, dynamic nature of these biological machines we live in.

You can buy the puzzles individually as listed above, or you can get the full bundle for $100 and save twenty bucks.

Buy Now