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From the New York Transit Museum’s ‘Get Kinetic!’ workshop to the Brooklyn Historical Society’s educational series with the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a growing number of city museums are offering hands-on learning for children. The STEM-focused programming emphasizes the basics of science, technology, engineering and math.

For an hour on Saturday afternoon, Emily Raimist and her sister Victoria were engineering superstars.

With speed and determination, Emily, 8, and Victoria, 6, designed a system of ramps and jumps to get a ball to zoom down a slide, knock over dominoes and push a toy car into motion.

The girls, visiting with their family from Chantilly, Va., were participating in the New York Transit Museum’s “Get Kinetic!” workshop, a hands-on activity to teach kids about the physics behind motion and speed.

Their dad, Scott Raimist, took a break from helping to cheer on his daughters’ work at the Brooklyn site. “I do think this is more instructive than sitting in a lecture,” he said. “We love museums like this.”

Turns out, foundational learning doesn’t just happen in math class or the science lab. Nowadays, kids are going beyond their schools to learn the basics of science, technology, engineering and math — also known as STEM.

Museums around the city offer a dizzying number of programs with creative approaches to STEM education. The Transit Museum alone runs about 125 STEM-oriented programs like “Get Kinetic!” every year, while a larger organization like the New York Hall of Science offers more than 450 such programs.

Margaret Honey, president and CEO of the New York Hall of Science, said this emphasis on hands-on learning highlights the importance of “exploration and discovery and messing about” that is central to scientific inquiry and creative problem-solving.

Whether it’s getting started with digital-animation software or building electronic circuits with tin foil and pipe cleaners, the museum’s programs teach kids to be thinkers and tinkerers.

“It doesn’t feel like science, it doesn’t feel like learning,” she said. “That’s what will get kids to ask the next set of questions.”

Even institutions outside the realm of science and math are creating STEM-focused programming.

The Brooklyn Historical Society has piloted an educational series with the Brooklyn Navy Yard for elementary and middle school students, examining the site’s role from the Revolutionary War to a center for local tech innovation.

Deborah Schwartz, president of the Brooklyn Historical Society, sees an organic connection between her institution’s historical focus and fields like waterfront management, landscape architecture and urban planning. “It’s very natural, for instance, for somebody who’s interested in the history of the Brooklyn Bridge to take the leap from its history to its engineering feats,” she said. “That flow works for kids especially.”

The historical society recently hosted the 3-D Mosque Architecture Experience, an immersive program developed by the Children’s Museum of Manhattan to teach kids about Islamic cultures through architecture, engineering and geometry.

Monica Bajraktarevic had brought her daughter Izabella, 10, her son Kenan, 9, and two of their friends from Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay. Her kids are fans of the building video game Minecraft, she said, so she thought the architectural program would appeal to them.

“I see that they build constantly but they build in the virtual universe,” Bajraktarevic said. “I think they do have aspirations to be architects one day, and this program really allows them to grow intellectually. It’s an introduction to a career path.”

But even if a child is too young to think about career paths, Andy Ackerman, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan’s executive director, advises parents to bring their kids to museums from an early age. “Don’t be afraid to expose them to great things,” he said.

“Learning is a lot like building a building,” Ackerman said. “The foundation is critical. If the foundation is poor, the whole building falls down.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 3, 2015 on page 18 of the New York Daily News edition with the Headline: STEM is the future. The Peanut Galleries: Museums letting kids get hands on with science.

By MERAL AGIS