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ABSTRACT Several studies suggest that children's learning and engagement with the content of play activities is affected by the ways parents and children interact. In particular, when parents are overly directive and set more goals during play with their children, their children tend to play less or are less engaged by subsequent challenges with the activity on their own. A concern, however, is that this directed interaction style is only compared with other styles of parent–child interaction, not with a baseline measure of engagement or learning. The present study incorporates such a baseline measure, comparing it with previously‐collected data on children's engagement and learning in a set of circuit‐building challenges. Regarding engagement, children were less engaged by the challenges when their parents were more directed during a free play setting (tested in Sobel et al. 2021) than when children had no prior experience playing with the circuit components. Regarding learning, children were better able to complete the circuit challenges and provided more causal explanations for how the completed challenges worked when they had experience playing with the circuit blocks with their parent. Overall, these data suggest that parent–child interaction during a STEM activity relates to both children's engagement and performance on challenges related to that activity.