Thanksgiving Weekend STEM Fun for Kids

Thanksgiving is a few days away. Kids are out of school. If you don’t find something to catch their attention, they’ll go stir-crazy waiting! So today, we’ll look at ideas for interesting Thanksgiving weekend STEM fun for kids that will keep their minds occupied.

As you may know, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are booming fields for the employment sector, but that doesn’t always translate into “fun for kids.” So how can you bring learning to your children for Thanksgiving and get them interested in STEM?

Easy, just share one (or all) of these fun ideas to engage their minds, and redirect them to STEM-focused activities.

1. Reveal the Volume of Turkeys Consumed Each Year

Our first idea starts with a huge number.

Each year in the United States, Americans consume around 46 million turkeys which equal around 704 million pounds of turkey.

Clue your kids into the volume of turkeys consumed each year, and ask what other numbers they can turn that into.

• If divided by 275 million people (the number of people expected to eat turkey on thanksgiving), how many pounds of turkey is that per person? 

You could even ask silly questions to spark their computational thinking skills.

• How many turkeys would fit in the Empire State building?

Keep questions relatively simple.  The idea is to give your kids just enough that they can ponder and process the data. Forty-six million is a lot of turkeys. Consider sharing an infographic (like the one below) to help them visualize just how much turkey that is. 

Image courtesy of TXU.com

Ask them if they could design an infographic to share with others.

Use free online software like Canva for graphic design.

This is a good way to bring the questions back to a technology focus so you can put your kids to work creating fun graphics instead of asking, “how much longer until Grandma arrives?”

As you start to think about STEM fun for kids, prepare to go outside of the box. 

Be creative.

It isn’t always obvious how a concept like Thanksgiving relates to technology or mathematics, but it can be done!

2. Share an Interesting Fact About Black Friday Smartphone Use

Here’s another big number to get their minds turning. When it comes to the day after Thanksgiving, people go into a buying frenzy.

Approximately 40% of Black Friday sales are made through smartphones.

That adds up to around $75 billion in sales! You can see why websites and their mobile formats are so important to businesses.

So what questions can you ask your kids?

• Who creates the websites for smartphones and how do they do it?

• What would you change about this website and why?

As far as STEM fun for kids goes, these questions lead right to curiosity about programming and coding.

That’s perfect!

Coding websites, especially for mobile setups, can be an extremely lucrative STEM-fueled career path.

Start with some basics. 

Get your kids online where they can work through a free CSS tutorial or watch HTML videos on YouTube. 

Ted Ed has an excellent beginner series on coding for kids. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVdHDMcepw

Once your child is hooked by the possibilities, consider enrolling them in a more focused program where their learning can take off like a rocket!

When kids get a taste of the world of digital development and design, they can become completely absorbed in it because they have so much fun engaging their creative side.

Another benefit is that they can spend hours learning about these concepts, and you can tend to your pies, rolls, and turkey as you get ready for the weekend.

3. Online Quizzes Deliver Hours of STEM Fun for Kids

If the first two ideas didn’t fully captivate your children, don’t stress. This one is guaranteed to provide countless hours of Thanksgiving STEM fun for kids.

Online quizzes are extremely engaging.

Websites like Buzzfeed have Thanksgiving quizzes Black Friday quizzes, Cyber Monday quizzes, and quizzes about virtually every other aspect of life imaginable.

Importantly, kids of all ages love to take online quizzes.

Why?

Because they get to learn about themselves while discovering the impossible (for instance, what kind of Thanksgiving dessert they are).

Sites like Buzzfeed are designed to engage viewers and keep them occupied for hours with back-to-back quizzes.

After your kid learns what kind of dragon they are, what shade their shadow personality is, and which celebrity born on Thanksgiving is their soulmate, ask them what kind of quiz they would make.

Now help them build their quiz using a free online survey system.

Here are a couple of great choices:

01. Google Forms:  Google offers a variety of free surveys and question types. Results can be displayed publicly or privately and they even provide neat graphic charts to break down the response results.

02. Typeform Quizzes: The Typeform website offers free, fully-customizable quiz types. Whatever theme your child wants to indulge in, Typeform can support it

Whether your child fills out quizzes or creates them, they’ll have something exciting to do and they’ll forget all about the wait leading up to Thanksgiving weekend.

What About After Thanksgiving Weekend?

The ideas above offer loads of STEM fun for kids without spending a fortune and without leaving the house.

When Thanksgiving weekend finally comes to a close, it’s time to think about how you’ll keep your kids interested in STEM going forward.

One of the best ways to do that is to enroll them in a STEM education program like those offered by iCode.

iCode provides instructor-led, classroom learning for kids. We specialize in STEM topics like coding, programming, web development, and robotics.

Once you get them started, they’ll never want to stop! 

So check out iCode and start your child down a path of lifelong STEM learning!