Grandkids Gift Guide – Find the perfect kids gifts for any occasion, including birthday presents, holiday gifts, new baby or baby shower gifts, and graduation presents.

If your grandchild (age 10+) is interested in stargazing and learning about astronomy, consider this new Star Pilot Space science kit by the award winning Young Scientists Club. The Star Pilot kit is much more than just an introduction to the night sky, although it does an excellent job of covering the basics. It includes an age-appropriate informational booklet, new technology (the “Star Pilot” device) that provides a visual hands-on approach to locating asterisms and constellations (like the Big Dipper), practice cards of the southern and northern hemispheres to help your grandchild learn how to use the Star Pilot, a large visual diagram which doubles as a decorative poster, and supplies to convert an ordinary flashlight into a night vision light. As a bonus, the kit also includes a card that grants you 40 minutes of free membership (and a user’s guide with suggested activities) to SLOOH, a website that allows real-time viewing of space through high-powered professional telescopes in Europe, South America and Australia. As the manual explains, it does take some time and practice to get the hang of using the Star Pilot device. It has a “star ball,” that shows and names the stars that form constellations, a magnifier eyepiece, where you view the lit star ball with one eye, a compass, and dials for focus and brightness control. Our testers needed to use the practice cards, adjusting the distance between them and the Star Pilot, until they learned to align the stars diagrammed on the star ball with those on the cards — as you would do with real stars in the night sky. It’s really a matter of your eyes adjusting to the process via a principle called “binocular fusion,” when one eye sees a picture and the other eye sees a similar (but not exactly the same) picture — and the brain fuses the two pictures into one! The kit’s manual is loaded with facts, snippets of history about the field of astronomy, suggested experiments, and explanations of various worldwide cultural myths and legends about constellations, such as the stories of Orion and Leo. The Star Pilot kit is appropriately targeted to children ages 10 and up, and adults interested in learning a bit of astronomy may also enjoy it. A younger grandchild will probably have difficulty using the Star Pilot device accurately. However, The Young Scientist Club also makes a Magic School Bus Secrets of Space science kit, in addition to other Magic School Bus science kits, that are targeted to age 5 and up.