What do children do at a STEM club?
At a good STEM club children build, code, experiment and solve problems with their hands, not just sit at a screen. At Tech Tigers every session runs four zones at once, from coding on iPads to robots, big builds and engineering puzzles, with nine rotating kits so no two sessions are the same.
One club, every kind of STEM
The honest answer is that it varies club to club, so it is always worth asking to see a real session plan. At Tech Tigers, every session is built around four hands-on zones running at once. Children move between them with a balance of guided support from instructors and the freedom to follow whatever grabs them, so it feels like play while covering coding, robotics, building and engineering in one club.
The four zones
Create on iPads: coding with Scratch, Scratch Jr and Tynker, digital art and animation, music-making in GarageBand, and physics and maths games. This is the only zone with screens in it.
Robots and circuits: LEGO WeDo robots, Snap Circuits, mouse-bots and coding caterpillars, stop-motion animation and Makey Makey inventions.
Big builds: interlocking marble runs and gravity mazes, magnetic shapes and tubes, Kapla blocks, Minecraft magnetic cubes and den building. Big, physical, and usually the liveliest corner of the room.
Engineering and puzzles: LEGO Prime, K'Nex, Engino and Gravitrax builds, balancing challenges, tangrams, dominoes and wooden maths puzzles for quieter, focused problem-solving.
Nine kits, rotating every session
The activity kit rotates across nine different kits, A to I, so the mix in every zone changes each visit. A child who comes for the robots still meets animation, circuits and engineering over a term, and no two sessions are ever quite the same.
What they take away
Watch a session and you see building, coding and a lot of laughing. What children practise underneath is breaking a problem into steps, testing an idea, coping when it fails and trying again. Those habits show up later in maths, science and anywhere else a hard problem does.
For quieter children there is another quiet win: finishing something difficult in front of other people, week after week, does more for confidence than being told to be confident ever has.
Sessions are interest-led rather than lesson-shaped. Instructors pitch each activity by age and stage for children aged 5 to 13, gently open doors to zones a child would not pick for themselves, and keep screen time limited to a healthy dose.
Tech Tigers runs STEM clubs for ages 5 to 13 across the West Midlands, where every session mixes coding, robotics, building and more on a rotating kit.
Find a club near youCommon questions
- Do children need experience or their own equipment?
- None at all. Everything is provided, and every activity is pitched by age and stage for ages 5 to 13.
- Is a STEM club all screens?
- No. At Tech Tigers only one of the four zones uses iPads, and the rest of the session is hands-on kit, building and problem-solving away from screens.
- Will my child do the same thing every week?
- No. The kit rotates every session across nine kits, so each visit brings a fresh mix in every zone.