Mind Stimulating Books for Everyone (Especially Kids)
For Christmas and his birthday, I always try to find a couple of books that focus on stimulating the imagination and helping Roger to observe the world from a fresh perspective.
This year, I found two gems.
This book is a chock full of ideas that focus on looking at, cataloguing, and interacting with the world in new ways. Most of the ideas are presented in a single page with associated illustrations or examples.
About a third of the book has sample grid paper, tables for recording information or pages otherwise marked up to help gather information.
An example accompanied by a neat picture of plastic cups configured in an interesting structure:
Instant Sculpture
Consider that everything around you is a source for sculpture. Try making quick pieces using whater you have around you in the moment.
Simple. Well presented. And thought provoking.
The second book is actually a reprint of a relative handful of articles from the popular Instructables web site.
So why get the book?
The printed form really works in conjunction with the web site, not as a competitor or just simply a reprint.
First and foremost, the book can be flipped through to spark ideas. It has a certain solidity to it that just can’t be had from the web page.
Beyond that, the articles are well presented and seem more accessible than the web site. The photos seem clearer and everything is nicely indexed within.
December 26th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Might be a couple years too early for Roger to appreciate <a HREFhttp://www.appliedthought.com/InsightPress/ThinkingPhysics.html, but I highly recommend it. If I ever taught a middle-school science class, I’d probably use this as one of the textbooks.
-jcr
December 26th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Gaah! Hate it when I get the tags messed up. Let’s try that again.
-jcr
January 3rd, 2009 at 7:53 pm
It would be a crime for you not to get Roger “The Way Things Work” by David Macaulay, if you haven’t already! It’s easily one of the very best books my parents gave me as a kid. If three weeks in the lab will save you a day in the library every time, this book is somewhere in between. It didn’t replace hands-on “reverse engineering”, but supplemented it in a great way.