STEM
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50 free STEM trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, four subjects that explain how the world works and supply the tools to change it. The stories behind them are full of surprises: a film star with a wartime patent, a child who named an enormous number, and a fastener copied from a weed. This quiz mixes all four strands. It covers classroom staples such as cells, gases, elements, simple machines and famous theories, alongside rockets, early computers and remarkable feats of construction. A large share of the questions celebrate women in STEM, from household names to pioneers whose work went uncredited for decades. The questions suit middle school students, classroom review games and family quiz nights, with a handful of tougher ones for enthusiasts. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so each round teaches something new.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping radio system to stop torpedoes being jammed?
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr patented the idea in 1942 with composer George Antheil. The US Navy turned it down, but related methods went on to protect Bluetooth signals from interference.
Q 02Which programming language did Guido van Rossum name after a British television comedy troupe?
Python
Python honours Monty Python's Flying Circus, which its creator was enjoying while he built the language. Its tutorials swap the usual placeholder names for spam and eggs, a nod to one of the troupe's sketches.
Q 03What name did a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew coin for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros?
Googol
Googol was the suggestion of Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner. Google later took its company name from a respelling of the word.
Q 04Which fastener did George de Mestral invent after studying burrs stuck to his dog's fur?
Velcro
Velcro copies the hundreds of tiny hooks he saw on the burrs under a microscope. Its name blends the French words velours and crochet, meaning velvet and hook.
Q 05Which scientist is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences, physics and chemistry?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie's papers are still so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes. Anyone who wants to consult them must wear protective clothing.
Q 06Which car part did Mary Anderson patent, reportedly after seeing a streetcar driver battle sleet?
Windshield wiper
The windshield wiper she designed was a hand-operated blade. Buyers saw no commercial value in it, and her patent expired in 1920 without ever reaching mass production.
Q 07Which shape are the wax cells of a honeycomb, a pattern that uses the least building material?
Hexagon
Hexagon grids split a flat surface into equal cells with the least total wall. Writers suspected as much around 36 BC, yet mathematicians only proved it in 1999.
Q 08Which NASA mathematician did John Glenn ask to recheck a computer's sums before his 1962 orbit?
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson verified the new electronic computer's figures, and Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. Her story reached millions through the 2016 film Hidden Figures.
Q 09Which pair of bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, made the first controlled powered aeroplane flights?
Wright brothers
The Wright brothers believed that balancing a bicycle showed an unstable flying machine could be mastered with practice. Their shop repaired cycles and built its own brand.
Q 10Which element, purified to make computer chips, gave a famous California technology valley its name?
Silicon
Silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth's crust, after oxygen, making up about 28% of it. Chip makers need it in an extremely pure form.
Q 11Which daughter of Lord Byron wrote what is often called the first published computer program?
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace's method told Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine how to work out Bernoulli numbers. The machine was never built, so she never saw her program run.
Q 12Which chemist's London lab produced Photo 51, the X-ray image that revealed the shape of DNA?
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin died of cancer at 37, four years before three men shared a Nobel Prize for the DNA discovery. A colleague had shown the image to a rival without her knowledge.
Q 13Which US Navy rear admiral built an early compiler and popularised the computing term debugging?
Grace Hopper
Q 21Which space object did Jocelyn Bell Burnell detect as radio blips nicknamed little green men?
Pulsar
Pulsar signals proved to come from rapidly rotating neutron stars. The discovery earned the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, but she was not among the people who received it.
Q 22Which cell part, nicknamed the cell's powerhouse, carries its own DNA inherited from the mother?
Mitochondrion
The mitochondrion has a genome like a bacterium's, evidence that its ancestors were free-living microbes that merged with larger cells. A 1957 magazine article popularised the powerhouse nickname.
Q 23Which element, the lightest of all, makes up about three quarters of normal matter in the universe?
Hydrogen
Grace Hopper's colleagues found a moth jamming a Harvard computer relay in 1947 and taped it into the logbook. She went on to manage one of the first compilers for the business language COBOL.
Q 14Which doctor and engineer became the first African American woman in space aboard Endeavour?
Mae Jemison
Mae Jemison opened each shift in orbit with a salute borrowed from Star Trek, the series that fed her interest in space. She later appeared in an episode of The Next Generation.
Q 15Which physicist became the first American woman in space aboard the shuttle Challenger in 1983?
Sally Ride
Sally Ride later sat on the panels that investigated the loss of both Challenger and Columbia, the only person to serve on both. Two Soviet women had reached orbit before her.
Q 16Which bulletproof-vest fibre did Stephanie Kwolek invent at DuPont while seeking lighter tyres?
Kevlar
Kevlar is five times stronger than steel for its weight. Its first commercial use, in the early 1970s, was as a replacement for the steel in racing tyres.
Q 17Which New York landmark did Emily Roebling help finish after her engineer husband became bedridden?
Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Bridge duties fell to her for more than ten years as she relayed her husband's instructions to the site. She was first to cross it by carriage, carrying a rooster as a sign of victory.
Q 18Which medical pioneer was also a statistician who drew rose-shaped charts of army deaths?
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale's diagrams showed season by season what was killing patients in the military hospital she ran. Her design, a relative of the pie chart, became known as the rose diagram.
Q 19Which subject does the acronym STEAM add to science, technology, engineering and mathematics?
The arts
The arts joined the acronym to bring creative approaches and imaginative design into technical lessons. The Rhode Island School of Design championed the change from STEM to STEAM.
Q 20Which gas do plants take in through leaf pores called stomata to make sugar in photosynthesis?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide enters through the stomata, but a plant cannot open them without losing water vapour at the same time. The oxygen plants release is a by-product of splitting water.
Hydrogen's commonest form is the simplest atom there is: one proton, one electron and no neutrons. Counted atom by atom, it makes up more than 90 percent of the universe.
Q 24Which English scientist set out three laws of motion and universal gravitation in the Principia?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton also built the first reflecting telescope and showed that a prism splits white light into colours. He spent his last three decades in London running the Royal Mint.
Q 25Which naturalist's voyage on HMS Beagle shaped the theory of evolution by natural selection?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was still writing up the idea in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay describing the same theory. The two men's papers were presented together in London.
Q 26Which chemist left gaps in his periodic table and predicted the elements that would fill them?
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev described three unknown elements so accurately that gallium, scandium and germanium matched his forecasts when they were found. Element 101 is named after him.
Q 27Which temperature scale used by scientists starts at absolute zero, the coldest anything can get?
Kelvin
Kelvin starts counting at about −273 °C, so water freezes at roughly 273 on the scale. It honours the British scientist Lord Kelvin, who proposed an absolute scale in 1848.
Q 28Which of the classic simple machines is at work in a seesaw, a crowbar and a pair of pliers?
Lever
Lever tools trade distance for force: a long push at one end shifts a heavy load a short way at the other. Archimedes set out the rule behind them in the third century BC.
Q 29Which Lyme Regis fossil hunter found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton as a child?
Mary Anning
Mary Anning could not join the Geological Society of London because she was a woman, though its members valued her finds. She also unearthed the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons.
Q 30Which computer scientist invented the World Wide Web while working at the CERN physics laboratory?
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee made the idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. He also devised HTML, the language web pages are written in.