I'm 66, and when I myself was 10 or 11 my friends on my street and I were completely obsessed with the Estes rocket and Cox .049 U-control scenes. Most of us were lucky enough to have engaged fathers and once the standard craft were assembled and flown, we all browbeat them mercilessly for more information for mods, shortcuts, hacks etc. My dad grew very wary of the 'Why can't we' type questions. I had modified a C-type engine Big Bertha rocket with an extra long transparent payload module which set the stage for various kidnappings of lizards, frogs, praying-mantises, eggs, multiple 1 and a quarter inch sockets, etc (all returned to earth unharmed, if not un-rattled). The nichrome wire igniters were troublesome for most of the kids. Bulky and expensive (for 4th graders) lantern batteries were hard to come by. We found we could steal D-cells from flashlights, hack cardboard tubes from paper towel rolls, reinforce with electrical tape, and make passable energy sources from that, etc. But all of that required questions from the closest available parent about voltage and series/parallel connections, as well as other questions about CG when modding the rockets themselves, etc. I think your STEM comment is very much on-point. None of my friends thought we were learning anything at the time. We were mostly just jazzed about doing fun stuff that had the potential for tearing itself apart in mid-air. I know the advent digital everything makes modeling systems for kids [Kerbal,etc] probably pretty trivial now, but actually crashing things in spectacular fashion IRL had/has it's own visceral rewards.