Kids don’t need an excuse to make something. That’s why the maker movement is picking up so much such steam; kids are natural tinkerers, and their love of building and creating also carries innumerable learning opportunities.

Even though they don’t need a reason, there’s a time of year when kids’ natural making abilities come out in full force—the holidays. And everyone knows the best gifts are handmade, complete with smudges, crooked edges, and hours of effort. But why not upgrade the typical craft session with all sorts of making this holiday season?

A visit to the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum’s MAKESHOP is a good place to start. As their new video demonstrates, making is an enormous confidence booster for kids. One young maker describes it this way: “That’s just when this ah-ha moment comes, and you look at this diagram and you’re like, ‘Oh! That’s why it’s not working. Let’s fix it.’”

“How many times have you heard a kid say, ‘Gee, I hope I don’t have to play anymore’? Well, it’s the same thing with making. Nobody says, ‘I hope I don’t have to make anymore,’” says Bonnie Dyer, curriculum and instruction coordinator at Allegheny Intermediate Unit, in another MAKESHOP video about the dispositions of makers.

If you’re not lucky enough to live in or visit Pittsburgh, MAKE Magazine has compiled a gift guide to inspire young designers. It suggests giving things like magnets, duct tape, knitting needles, and prisms. They’re presents kids might not expect, but there’s perhaps no better evidence of the affinity kids have for the simple things than the old cliché: You give kids a toy, and they end up playing with the box.

“Whatever gifts you choose, encourage your kids to take their toys and kits apart and use the pieces for other things. Bundle your science kits with books and materials that take the concept introduced in the kit, such as circuits or chemistry, into uncharted territory,” writes Michelle Hlubinka, who compiled MAKE’s guide.

[one_third][blockquote style=”large”]The experiences kids gain from engaging in maker projects are more valuable than the products themselves. [/blockquote][/one_third][two_third_last]

Beyond traditional chemistry sets, consider looking into Invent-Abling kits. Designed by Carnegie Mellon University alum Deren Güler, the kits were developed to be gender neutral, and include projects like “activated origami”—mini paper circuits that light up—and move.

Of course, there are also GoldieBlox STEM kits for girls. The kits’ tagline is “toys for future inventors,” and they were developed to draw more girls into messing around and making things work. The company’s recent advertisement that features three girls creating an awesome Rube Goldberg machine with the discarded parts of tea sets and dolls went completely viral over the last few weeks. In the video, the young inventors sing: “It’s time to change/ We deserve to see a range/ Because our toys all look the same/ And we would like to use our brains!”[/two_third_last]

At the risk of sounding hokey, there’s a more important gift that comes out of making than projects like birdhouses, terrariums, boats, and circuits. The experiences kids gain from engaging in maker projects are more valuable than the products themselves. They can spark curiosity about the world around us at a time when traditional the classroom curriculum still fails to engage too many children. As education writer Annie Murphy Paul explained recently, “Tinkering is the polar opposite of the test-driven, results-oriented approach of No Child Left Behind: it involves a loose process of trying things out, seeing what happens, reflecting and evaluating, and trying again.”

Sparking a lifelong love of STEM? Now that’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Photo/ Alper Orus