You can make extra-creepy candy crawlies by swapping a secret ingredient—tonic water—into a gummy worm recipe. This one is adapted from Modernist Cuisine, and the quinine in the tonic causes the sweets to glow under a black light. Your kids (and your dentist) will totally freak out.

Ah, the wonders of old-school chemistry sets: a little explosive powder here, some radioactive material there, and acids strong enough to dissolve a corpse. Then came the lawsuits. Today's kits can't really compare, but a handful do pack the proper equipment to get kids started.

Geeks come in all shapes, sizes, and genders. So why do publishers assume that girls are just princesses-in-training? Here are a few books that can teach your daughter—or son—that girls can geek out too. Violet the Pilot Who needs a starter kit when you’ve got a family-owned junkyard? Violet engineers ...

It's one of the great pleasures of parenthood: strapping your kid to a bike and going for a ride. There are lots of ways to do it. Tons, in fact. Too many, actually. So, let's make this easy.

Making plaster casts is a good exercise: You have to think upside down and backward. One of my sons made a "space remote"; the other made a fish.

In 1975 Buckminster Fuller first defined the term tensegrity, a portmanteau of “tensional integrity.” It refers to structural systems that derive their stability from various elements acting against each other with equal force, like the surface tension of a bubble. Tensegrity lies at the heart of giant projects like the ...

Want to introduce your kids to electronics? Ditch the circuit boards and go with that sticky staple of early childhood: Play-Doh. The off-the-shelf variety isn't conductive enough, but adding the right amount of salt and cream of tartar to your homemade version lets you create circuits, illuminate LEDs, and even ...

Before I was a geek dad, I was a geeky kid—with all the classic credentials. I played Dungeons & Dragons, watched Star Trek reruns every night, and had an awesome HO-scale train layout. But at that stage of our cultural evolution, geek was still an epithet. I didn’t want to ...

When Jamie Hyneman and I build hovercrafts for Mythbusters, I realized that these floating on-air vehicles were easy to make, not too expensive, and fun. So I built one with my kids.

Tools/Materials: Paper or plastic cup Foam tape Low-voltage DC motor * 2 AAA batteries Wide rubber band Electrical tape Hot-glue gun 3 or more thin washable markers How to Build an Art Bot 1. Turn the cup upside down and layer foam tape on the bottom (which is now the ...