Thank you, WowWee for sponsoring this post. Be sure to visit WowWee today to buy Minion MiP and Botsquad in time for the holidays!

Do you do STEM activities with your kids? I bet you do and you don’t even realize it. A lot of the activities we do with our kids naturally include science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), but we just don’t talk about it with them.

For my day job, I actually work for a university to try to get elementary, middle and high school kids interested in STEM. Currently, I work with schools, museums, afterschool programs, and other places where people learn about STEM (think zoos, aquariums, etc.). In the U.S. and globally, we don’t have enough people going into these STEM jobs. Even worse, we still don’t have equal representation of women or people of color in STEM jobs. Even a lot of our STEM jobs are being outsourced to other places. Basically, we have a bit of a crisis and we need our kids to be more interested in STEM.

Kids are natural scientists – they ask questions, they are creative, they interrogate their worlds. They seek answers to complex questions all the time. The thing is, somewhere along the line, a lot of us lose that inquisitive nature and creativity, but we don’t have to. The next time you’re doing an activity with your child that incorporate STEM, talk to them about the scientific topics, tell them they are being a scientist or an engineer. It’s really that simple to start incorporating STEM into their lives. By reinforcing that STEM is cool, your kids will begin to internalize that they are scientists (here’s a great article to get your kids to think like scientists).

Lately, we’ve been getting our kids interested in STEM through robots. WowWee has kid-friendly robots that my kids love. They especially love the Minion ones because they love those movies and it’s a character they know. The Minion MiP robots are straight out of Gru’s lair. This motion-detecting, self-balancing henchman is ready to play. Get up to all kinds of mischief with your very own Minion MiP Turbo Dave from WowWee. Packed with fun and games, this self -balancing robot speaks Minionese^TM the official Minion language, responds to clapping and hand gestures, and can be controlled from the Turbodave app on your compatible smartphone or tablet. He even has his own Fart Blaster. The Minion MiP is full of personality, the only full experience robotic Minion that brings the minion world to life and has an app for pairing the robotic programming and AR experience through gameplay. Right now, you can save 20% using code 20MINIONMIP.