Welcome to TechCrunch's 2019 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We'll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December, so check back regularly. We've refreshed our annual STEM toy gift guide with the latest wares clamoring to entice and inspire kids with coding tricks and electronic wizardry. But lean in to this market and you'll find a number of STEM toy makers have winked out of existence since this time last year, or else been folded into others' empires. Such as littleBits selling to Sphero this fall, or Root Robotics being picked up by robot vac giant iRobot in June.

You say you're a parent or teacher investigating robot kits for children? And you don't want a simple solution with a single purpose: you want the child to experience science, technology, engineering, and math? You want a kit that teaches all four categories, from piecing together the foundation to wiring the appendages to programming the "brain" using software. That's where our list of robot kits for kids comes in. Most of the robot kits listed below are tied to terms such as STEM, Arduino, and Blockly.

Perhaps no other technology was as disruptive as artificial intelligence in 2017. 'Machine learning,' 'neural network,' and'data bias' became commonplace terms in the headlines of mainstream media outlets, signifying the machines had arrived. And with them comes an uncertain future. We reached out to several experts to tell us what to expect from AI in 2018. These educational robots make a lot of sense from a business perspective-- there's a big market for STEM education toys and they're more affordable to produce as they don't require massive CPU, lots of sensors or advanced AI.

Perhaps no other technology was as disruptive as artificial intelligence in 2017. 'Machine learning,' 'neural network,' and'data bias' became commonplace terms in the headlines of mainstream media outlets, signifying the machines had arrived. And with them comes an uncertain future. We reached out to several experts to tell us what to expect from AI in 2018. These educational robots make a lot of sense from a business perspective-- there's a big market for STEM education toys and they're more affordable to produce as they don't require massive CPU, lots of sensors or advanced AI.

"When Lionardo was at Milan the King of France came there and desired him to do something curious; accordingly he made a lion whose chest opened after he had walked a few steps, discovering himself to be full of lilies." Constructing a mechanical lion that could walk, let alone present flowers to the king, can't have been a simple task back in 1515 – even for a genius like Leonardo da Vinci. How he managed this feat remained a mystery until 2000, when US robotics expert Mark Rosheim came to a surprising conclusion. Pulling together fragments of notes and drawings, Rosheim worked out that the lion was almost certainly powered by a clockwork cart illustrated in da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus (see Illustration) Intriguingly, Rosheim suggested that the cart's steering mechanism was controlled by arms attached to rotating gears. With this design it would have been possible to control the automaton's movements simply by changing the position of these arms – in other words, Rosheim argues, da Vinci's lion was not only clockwork, it was also programmable.