More than 200 students and parents enjoyed a night of exciting forays into science, technology, engineering and math Friday at Northern Shores Elementary School.

STEM Night featured numerous activities throughout the school that allowed students to be creative by themselves and with the help of friends and family. There were cardboard construction challenges, experiments in design and plenty of Legos to go around.

“We left baseball practice early to get here,” said Cristine Pisani with her children Peyton, 2, Paige, 5, and Parker, 7.

Paige and Parker worked to get their Code and Go Robot Mouse to follow the right path to the prized cheese. The kids tried again and again and eventually figured out the right button combination.

“The hardest part was just getting the mouse to move,” Parker said.

There were several coding and engineering exercises for the students, including “unplugged” NASA rover races that had one student acting as a rover and following the specific instruction of another student, the “coder.”

“It’s the same concept as programming — minus the technology — and the kids love it,” said gifted resources teacher Nina Valdivieso.

Jackson Smith, 13, and Kellan Fernanders, 11, worked together on a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robotics set. Jackson put together his Lego robot and managed to get his creation moving with the push and pull of his controller.

“I like engineering, programing and electronics in general,” Jackson said. “It’s crazy what you can do, and it’s not that complicated once you get the basics.”

Students displayed their projects on climate change that discussed the dangers of rising global temperature, carbon emissions and what their families and school can do to go green.

Fourth grader Keelon Grier, 10, made a computer game using construct.net with the help of his mother, Kizzy Grier, that asks players to search through a house for ways to be more energy efficient, whether it’s unplugging the computer that’s not in use or replacing inefficient lightbulbs.

“The whole reason we made this game is because fossil fuels are running out,” Keelon said. “We want people to make better decisions.”

All these projects and activities fostered problem solving skills, including the “breakout room” in which students found hyperlinks on a Google image of the solar system, read the linked passages and answered questions based on the reading.

Fourth-grade teacher Melanie Burnor said the breakout room was meant to give parents ideas for inexpensive summer activities, because it’s important to teach them how to problem-solve when they’re still too young to care about being wrong. That way, they can learn that mistakes are natural when searching for solutions.

“You need to get them into these problem-solving skills early, before they’re afraid to make mistakes,” Burnor said.