Little Finds
Websites, projects, videos, books, games, music, and other things I've found that kids and kids-at-heart would enjoy.
Instrument Playground (Google Arts & Culture)
Play and mix instruments from around the world right in your browser, with a little help from AI.
Viola the Bird (Google Arts & Culture)
Conduct a tiny bird-orchestra — a playable music toy, not just something to watch.
Marblevator — A Looping Marble Machine
A satisfying little marble contraption you can build and watch loop forever.
The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition (Micromouse)
Tiny robots memorize a maze, then sprint it at impossible speed. Mesmerizing engineering.
Party Parrot Zoetrope (Adafruit)
A spinning zoetrope that brings the internet's favorite party parrot to life.
How to Make Giant Transparent Sugar Crystals at Home - Crystalverse
Did you know that you can grow transparent sugar crystals at home?
The 11 Most Useful Knots Everyone Should Know
Clear animations of the knots every kid feels a little cooler knowing.
ROBOTS: Your Guide to the World of Robotics
A gray bipedal humanoid wearing a Unitree shirt stands posed with one arm raised.
20 Minutes of Charles Schulz Drawing Peanuts
Watch the master draw Snoopy and Charlie Brown — catnip for any kid who doodles.
GRAVITY — Interactive Solar System
Fling planets around and feel how gravity really works — a sandbox, not a lecture.
KenKen — Math Puzzles That Feel Like Games
Sudoku's playful cousin — sneaky math practice kids actually ask for.
How Disney Makes an Animated Film
A peek behind the curtain at how an animated movie actually gets made, step by step.
Animation for Beginners (DIY.org)
Explore the science and history of animation — then make your own.
Explorable Flexagons
- Introduces the *hexaflexagon*, with 6 equilateral triangles per face, and the *pinch flex*, a way of folding a flexagon to reveal previously hidden faces
Rabbit Waves
The International Code of Signals is a system of signals and codes designed to communicate important safety and navigational messages when speaking is difficult (because of languag
Mo Willems Workshop
#1 - Texico
How To Start A Rocket Engine | Everyday Astronaut
Liquid-fueled rocket engines operate by flowing fuel and oxidizer into a combustion chamber at high pressure in order to eject mass out of the rocket nozzle at high velocities. Whi
CircuitMess: DIY STEM Kits for Kids, Teens & Adults
CircuitMess projects are more than assembling and coding robots. They're about igniting a passion for STEM and building essential problem-solving skills.
OctoStudio
Two people's hands hold a phone, using the OctoStudio app to code a project featuring an octopus
Comic history thread scott⚡️mccloud (@scottmccloud.bsky.social)
A Monster Thread indeed! Recommended reading, RT'd from the mind of the late, much-loved, much-missed Jesse Hamm.
Best kids books: The 25 greatest picture books of the past 25 years.
Illustration of a child's bookshelf that contains many of the books in this list, including Julián Is a Mermaid, Crown, Olivia, and They All Saw a Cat..
How a Bicycle Is Made
From British Council film, a short film from 1945 that shows how a bicycle is designed and manufactured.
Searching for Birds
Most searched birds types in the US
Why the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influential Comic Strips
If you know more than a few millennials, you probably know someone who reveres *Calvin and Hobbes* as a sacred work of art. That comic strip’s cultural impact is even more remark
When J.R.R. Tolkien Posed as 'Father Christmas' for 23 Years
J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Letters From Father Christmas.’ / Courtesy of William Morrow
Star Wars Intro Creator | Free Tool
Make your own Star Wars intro by editing the text below, then hit play and share!
Pixel Planet Generator by Deep-Fold
A showcase of some shader code for Godot game engine. Currently there are 8 types of planets, also generates black holes, galaxies, stars and asteroids. Each type has a lot of poss
The True Scale of Animals
The True Scale of Animals: Over the eons, animals have appeared in all shapes and sizes – from tiny tardigrades to building-sized dinosaurs. Global Data created this video to ill
All of Earth's water in a single sphere! | U.S. Geological Survey
All water on Earth in a sphere, placed over a "dry" globe
TAKE TECH
Collection - Van Gogh Museum
To offer you the best way to enjoy all about the museum and Vincent van Gogh on our website, we always use functional and analytical cookies. We ask for your permission to use cook
Category:Set of Platonic solids; nets with gluing edges - Wikimedia Commons
This category is an [image set](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Image_sets). It should contain only images that have the same style, and should have a parent category th
Radios, how do they work? - lcamtuf’s thing
Radio communications play a key role in modern electronics, but to a hobbyist, the underlying theory is hard to parse. We get the general idea, of course: we know about frequencies
Nuclear Reactor Simulator -
Enter a 2 to 4 character nickname in the box above.
Dungeon Scrawl | Free Online D&D Map Maker
Connect Dungeon Scrawl maps to pages in your Roll20 campaigns now. [Read more on our blog.](https://blog.roll20.net/posts/build-epic-vtt-maps-in-minutes-dungeon-scrawl-connects-wit
The Visual World of 'Samurai Jack'
Samurai Jack background art by Scott Wills
How to get kids to read for fun: People who work on middle-grade books have some ideas.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by mediaphotos/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Unsplash.
Every Kind of Bridge Explained in 15 Minutes
From Practical Engineering, this is a video explaining every type of bridge in just 15 minutes…or at least attempts to.
Space Elevator
Calligraphr - Features
Fonts created with Calligraphr are standard Font files (ttf or otf format). Once created and downloaded, they work independently from Calligraphr, no problem if you want to delete
Library of Juggling - Home
How LEDs are Made - SparkFun Learn
During the 2014 trip to China, our supplier YunSun was kind enough to pick us up in Shenzhen and give us a tour of their factory.
Let's Get Creative
A fun collection of online creative games and apps
Eyes on the Solar System - Home - NASA/JPL
3D ISS Tracker
Tiny beauty: how I make scientific art from behind the microscope
Cheese fungus, head lice, human sperm, a bee eye, a microplastic bobble: scientific photographer Steve Gschmeissner has imaged them all under the probing lens of a scanning electro
Bead & Wire Running Man (Rob Ives)
Print, fold, and crank a paper automaton whose legs actually run.
The Beautiful Skyscrapers of Early 20th Century America
Using drones, a team led by photographer Chris Hytha has been traveling around the country [capturing images of the tops of some of America’s most beautiful and notable early 20t
Mechanical Creations
Akiyoshi's illusion pages
**Akiyoshi'sillusionpages**
Optical Lens Design Forms: An Ultimate Guide to the types of lens design
There are so many optical systems that are out there.
Why Feathers Are One of Evolution’s Cleverest Inventions
Fossil and living birds reveal the dazzling biology of feathers
Knit Hello – Typeknitting
Pluck - string instrument - fun!!
see this site for some coding background suggested in HN comments:
Circuits for Hobbyists - a Collection of Schematics to Build
How do you become better at electronics? By building lots of circuits.
MatterChart - Interactive Periodic Table & Element Explorer
> "The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. But not in that order." — Harlan Ellison
Japanese Milk Bread (Shokupan) (Video) 食パン • Just One Cookbook
Kites – Home (good site design)
How to Host an Epic Slime Party - Babble Dabble Do
It’s the best kind of messy, it’s creative, it’s a blast, these are three reasons you should consider throwing **an epic slime party** for your child’s next birthday!
