STEM activities for toddlers

STEM activities are activities that promote learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. They claim to help children work towards careers in these areas. They promote cognitive and psychomotor development in children, and assist in developing their meta-cognitive knowledge. While typical STEM activities for young children are categorized into broad categories of robotics, physics and astronomy and are geared towards children aged 3+, STEM activities exist for children as young as one year. The following paper identifies a set of STEM activities geared towards toddlers, the reasons why these activities qualify as STEM activities, and subsequently identifies competencies acquired by the child while completing these activities, and the sub-competencies associated with each competency. The cognitive, psychomotor and affective skills promoted by these activities are also identified and subsequently the difficulty of different competencies associated with the same activity is compared. The activities chosen for discussion are blocks and shape sorters.