Hi everyone,

If you have children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, or you have to buy a present for a child, you may be struggling to find meaningful options for your holiday giving. Look no further: Girlstart is here to help.

I’m writing as a parent and as somebody who gets to see a lot of materials here at Girlstart. We’re going to be talking about things we use here at Girlstart, and then I’ll give you a list of other ideas, so that you have a well-rounded set of options. None of these are paid endorsements, and what’s in this blogpost should not be understood as such. Just sharing our experiences.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that you already have a full set of 31 gifts already in your hands: a STEM advent calendar of sorts, with DeSTEMber. It’s our gift to you, and you can give it to a child just by taking time to do some STEM with them. You can work through DeSTEMber activities some days, or even every day, and we post the materials lists for the week ahead, so you can be ready. Most of the things you need are already around your house. Previous years’ DeSTEMber activities are also here, and here.

We at Girlstart love computer science. But we find that some tools don’t foster a sense of authorship or ownership. That’s why we have used, and continue to use, a great application called Agent Sheets, developed by Alex Repenning at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The application nurtures coding skills, but is also very friendly. There are a few tutorials, here, and here. You can get Agent Sheets here.

Lately we’ve had a lot of fun with Jay Silver’s MaKey MaKeys. Want to turn basically anything conductive into a piano? You can with the MaKey MaKey. Load up Scratch and grab a MaKey MaKey, and you can have a lot of fun hacking a keyboard without causing permanent damage. Girls LOVED the MaKey MaKey experiences they had at Girlstart Summer Camp last summer. (May I also suggest that a week or two, or three, of Girlstart Summer Camp in Austin makes a perfect gift? Registration opens in January, but you can make your own ‘Camp Certificate’ here, then come back to girlstart.org and finish registration.)

We also like Kano. They are new, Raspberry Pi-based kits that foster computer science skills, in a fun way.