Full STEAM Ahead: 10 Educational Toys That Will Foster a Love for Learning

Rated for babies aged three months and older, this Montessori textured teething toy and rattle by PandaEar will spark your twins' curiosity while they're teething. It's made of durable, food-grade silicone and has an ergonomic design, so your babies can easily grasp it and access all of the teething areas. Its texture allows your children to discover and explore new senses. Soothing sounds entertain and enhance both motor skills and imagination. This teething toy is top-rack dishwasher safe and can be sterilized by boiling, microwave, or electric sterilizer.

The Zany Zoo wooden activity cube has five sides to encourage your children to learn about the alphabet and try their hand at solving maze and zigzag tracks. This durable activity center has peekaboo doors, is made of solid wood, and has rounded corners to keep your kids safe. Rated for toddlers aged one year and older, its tiny features help to improve your little ones' fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.

This interactive toy chair can help strengthen your twins' fine and gross motor skills, and it introduces the concept of cause and effect, as it plays music and phrases when your kids sit down or stand up. It's equipped with hands-on activities their inquisitive minds can explore, from an illustrated flipbook, to a light-up pretend TV remote, to a seat cushion they can lift up to discover surprises hidden underneath. The seat features fun lights and plays over 120 different songs, sounds, and phrases that will entertain your children as they learn through interactive play. This toy chair will grow with your toddlers, from one year and up (to a maximum weight of 55 pounds) because it has three different learning stages that teach your kids about colors, shapes, numbers, counting, and opposites in four different languages (English, Spanish, French, or Brazilian Portuguese).

This is the Monster Math Scale by Hape. It's a STEAM toy that encourages the development of fine motor skills and concentration. Through hands-on experimenting with this weighing scale and weights (which are designed to look like a cute monster family your kids will think are super silly), your kids will be introduced to simple math skills. This 22-piece set includes nine larger weights and 11 smaller soft weights, and it has three different levels of play to help your little ones learn about weight measurements and balance.

This is a 150-piece magnetic race car track and building block toy set by PicassoTiles. It's an educational construction playset that encourages early STEM learning by mixing artistic skills with science, technology, engineering, and math. And because there are so many pieces, your twins will be able to build to their hearts' content simultaneously without fighting over who gets which block. This set includes a variety of blocks, from curves and turns, to square track tiles, and supporting columns, from rectangular track tiles and triangles, to slopes, speed bumps, and traffic splits, this set comes with endless possibilities for your early engineers. It also comes with 12 street sign posts and four light-up racecars, so each twin can have two cars to experiment their racetracks with.

This air-powered STEM building toy encourages spatial reasoning, creativity, experimentation, and problem-solving as your kids play and experiment with airflow and physics. It's a kid-safe turbine that sends soft foam balls soaring through a network of modular tubes that can be arranged in any way your twins can imagine. Rated for kids ages three and older, this set comes with 20 foam balls and can get up to three hours of runtime per charge (it can be fully recharged in less than two hours). To prevent battery drain, an automatic shut-off features kicks in after 15 minutes.

This engineering kit is a double adventure for your dynamic duo. It's a read-along and build-along experience for inquisitive minds that like to get hands-on as they learn. The accompanying storybook helps children learn about simple machines and gear trains while they build simple, non-motorized models of the robots they construct and fix in the story. The robots they'll engineer have moving parts, wheels, and gears. Best of all, this set features large, colorful plastic pieces that make it easy for smaller hands to put together.

This interactive marble run system allows kids to tap into their creativity while they create always-evolving (and always-epic) marble runs. While they play and explore the endless possibilities with this set, they'll learn about spatial awareness, cause and effect, problem solving, gravity, magnetism, and kinetics. This open-ended STEAM toy can also be combined with other GraviTrax sets (GraviTrax, GraviTrax PRO, and GraviTrax POWER) to expand the possibilities.

What better way to learn about engineering and physics (force, motion, gravity, simple machines, collisions, and more) than by making your very own pinball machine? This building kit encourages creative problem-solving and allows kids to learn through open-ended, hands-on, trial-and-error experiments. As if creating their own pinball machine wasn't cool enough, it uses gumballs as the pinballs (it comes with 45 gumballs). The reconfigurable and reusable building system includes bumpers, slingshots, bells, ramps, and more that can be moved around to create a different playing field.

This STEAM toy introduces the next generation of screen-free coding and STEM skills to help kids learn about coding and its associated challenges. Botley the Coding Robot 2.0 can be programmed to do a sequence of up to 150 steps, and it can discover 16 interactions that transform Botley into a train, police car, ghost, and more. Rated for children who are five and older, this award-winning activity set comes with 78 pieces, including a remote programmer, detachable robot arms, 40 coding cards, six double-sided tiles, 27 obstacle building pieces, and a starter guide with coding challenges. The revamped robot includes expanded coding for music, lights, and movement.