If you have a child who’s into science, technology, engineering and math – or one you’d like to inspire – Purdue University’s gift guide could help you pick just the right holiday present.
The Purdue Engineering Gift Guide can connect kids with engineering-inspired gifts, said Tamara Moore, a professor of engineering education in the College of Engineering and the director of the INSPIRE Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering at Purdue.
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FULL GUIDE: Click here for the full Purdue Engineering Gift Guide
“The purpose of the guide is to give it to people who want to give gifts at the holiday season that will both engage their young ones and help them learn something about engineering, STEM,” Moore said. “This year in particular, we’re focusing in on microelectronics.”
Microelectronic components can be found in phones, earbuds, smartwatches, cars and robots.
“Anything that has any sort of automation will have a microelectronics piece in it. So your phone, your earphones, you know, your smartwatch, your car has like 100 microelectronic chips in it. So the microchips are the brains of all of the automated things that we use from an electronics perspective,” Moore said. “We focus in on things that have circuitry or microelectronic versions of circuitry. We focus on things that were automated, so robots, we have several robots in our spaces. And we focus in on things that were a little more hardware related. So we have things that actually teach about microelectronics themselves, so books and some other things like that.”
Moore explained that the gift guide is compiled with expertise from a broad range of people, including engineering professors, education experts, researchers, and, of course, children.
“In general, we look for things that are for a range of ages and a range of different kinds of interests,” Moore said. “The Engineering Gift Guide reaches all 50 states and about 150 countries every year. Each year we have focused on a broad range of gifts. Some years it was very engineering-specific, some years it was a little more STEM, broadly. This year, like I said, this is more microelectronics focused.”
The top three gifts listed in the 2024 guide are the “SOIC & SOT: The Microchips” picture book, the Mochi Robotics Kit and the Snap Circuits Arcade kit.
“I think every year, we find that we’re reaching more and more people,” Moore said. “So it’s a very exciting sort of gift that we give back to the community.”