Home science and engineering projects that my kids and I enjoyed

When my kids were young, we did lots of science and engineering things with them to entertain them or just to alleviate boredom. We visited many science museums. We did numerous kits (e.g., Tinker Crate a.k.a KiwiCo), as well as followed published activities like the Marshmallow Challenge or recipes like homemade ginger ale (which was just okay).

But most of our favorite projects were things we made up.

• Make a “bagpipe” out of a recorder, a plastic bag, and a straw. A bagpipe can play a constant note for longer than a human can exhale: the player blows into a bag, then squeezes the bag to force the air through an instrument. You can rig something together that will do the same thing.
• Try to figure out how best to keep an ice cube from melting. Do this as little experiments to figure out what helps. E.g., place a control ice cube in a cup and another on a wire mesh suspended over the cup. Which lasts longer? Why? Also: put two ice cubes in cups, then have your kid cover one with their warmest winter jacket. Which will melt first?
• Use a protractor and some math to try to measure the height of a tall tree in the neighbor’s yard, then figure out whether it’s close enough to your house to hit it.
• Make a wood swing. Our swing still sits in our front yard and is used daily by passing kids.
• Create a scale model of the Earth/Moon system. A globe of the Earth has an enormous amount of play and educational value. Somehow we also ended up with a globe of the Moon. (You could also just print pictures out on a paper.) We worked out how far apart they should be at scale, then physically put them that distance apart. It’s further than you think. In our case the straight-line distance just barely fit inside our first floor.
• “Potion Lab”: mix household substances together and see what you get. (Our kids generally pursued two lines of research: fragrances and insecticides.) If the substances include baking soda and vinegar, eventually something surprising will happen.
• Construct a maze for a hamster.
• Create an elevator for stuffed animals.
• Create a zipline for stuffed animals.
• Weigh all the stuffed animals on a kitchen scale to determine who is the lightest and who is the heaviest.
• Gather all the Legos in the house and try to build a freestanding tower that can reach the ceiling. This is a good use for Duplos. Our house has a light well to the second floor, and we were just barely able to make a tower on the first floor that reached up to the level of the second.
• Body conductivity. One electronics kit included a tiny speaker alarm powered by AA batteries. Our kids discovered that if their fingers were wet, and they each held a wire leading to the speaker, they could touch each other and the alarm would sound. They found this to be absolutely hilarious.
• Get a can of soda or any processed sweet food with an ingredients label. Find out much sugar is in the thing, covert the grams to teaspoons (4 g = 1 tsp), then make a pile of that much sugar. Compare different things to find the thing with the most added sugar, then make that pile of sugar. Consider whether you now want to eat that pile of sugar.
• Proprioception challenge: stand a couple of feet away from some cups on the floor. Close your eyes and keep them closed as you try to drop a marble into a cup. (This was part of a longer series of challenges to show that you have way more than five senses.)
• Build a big crane that can dangle a cat toy from the second floor to the first floor.
• Business/index card “sailboats”. You may be able to do this at a restaurant if the host counter offers business cards and you have a glassy table. Fold a card any way you want, place it on a smooth table, then blow on it. Try to come up with the one that glides the best across the table.

These specific activities were all great fun — but the point is that you can do a lot with what you already have. The main thing is to decide to do something, spot something you can work with, and then announce that it’s time for a project.

Tip: You can make any project more interesting by giving it a distinctive name. You’re not making a crane, you’re making a Sky Crane. You’re not making a cat bed, you’re making The Circle of Comfort. Sometimes the name comes at the beginning; sometimes one of you will say something funny in the middle and you can use that.