Peer Review

30+ Awesome STEM Challenges for Kids (with Inexpensive or Recycled Materials!)

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Mar 24, 2025 by Teacher Education

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

This online site material offers STEM projects using affordable, inexpensive or recycled materials to develop learners's creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. The projects can benefit leaners, educators and parents in classrooms and or at home.

Building and engineering projects are valuable for developing thinking skills and encouraging the ability to design and create. This collection of STEM engineering challenges can be fun and engaging, and also make use of recycled or inexpensive materials found around the home.

The website content can be incorporated into variety of classroom disciplines at varying levels, preschool through 8th grade.

Type of Material:

Drill and Practice STEM Activities

Recommended Uses:

The material will suit elementary teachers who plan to get their children parents involved in becoming more knowledgeable on the STEM field. The material can also be used at any level of education when instructors need simple ways in which they can guide learners in how to run certain experimients in the:

Classroom
At home
Individually
Teamwork

Technical Requirements:

Users just need reliable internet connection to view content on this website.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

The website aims to guide teachers in meeting students learning needs in the STEM field by providing ideas for hands-on engineering ideas for students to complete projects that rely on a using inexpensive, simple and readily available materials.

The target audience is kids and kids' parents that need enough ideas on developing STEM experiments. Parents can navigate the website and try the suggested ideas.

Target Student Population:

College Upper Division, Graduate School, Professional, Homeschooling families, Educators, Parents

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

The prerequisite might be to have knowledge on any of the STEM fields but all skills otherwise are very basic.

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

The website presents practical projects which use low cost material. For example it engages users with analyzing the strength of a structure, and what would happen with that strenght when using different materials.

Users analyze and extend that knowledge to other areas of the construction task. Potential users can test different materials and a diverse of structures to be built. Students need to be curious, patient, and analytical on what the process and the final product turn to be. The activities are:

Hands-on
Encourage creativity
Optionally collaborative

Concerns:

Clarity of guides for some activities on landing page would be helpful.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

The website aims to guide teachers in designing practical activities with low-cost material in order to create projects that address the STEM field. Teachers may test the projects and have their students analyze the steps to a certain task. As students are exposed to trying out different hands on projects such as magnetism and engineering with paper, they discover the fascinating world of chemistry, physics, math and more. The website content can be incorporated into variety of classroom disciplines at varying levels, preschool through 8th grade.

Encourages experimentation.
Uses inexpensive materials
Adaptable to various groups

Concerns:

Although learning objectives would vary depending upon the discipline STEM Challenges could be improved with:

learning objectives for each activity.
measurable outcomes at end of learning.
possibly adding learner assessment or assessment suggestions.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

The website includes workable hyperlinks and descriptions of what each task involves. All information is up to date and maintains working hyperlinks.

Easy to follow instructions on a variety of external sites.
Simple to set up.
Embraces self-paced instruction guide for learners.

Other Issues and Comments:

Excellent resource for parents, teachers, and kids offering creative, hands-on STEM challenges using inexpensive or recycled materials, making it accessible for classrooms and home learning.

While engaging, clearer instructions and defined learning outcomes would enhance its overall effectiveness and usability.

Creative Commons: