Science books for children are thriving, partly because of the competition from new media.
Why is Snot Green?
- Glenn Murphy
The Gooey Chewy Rumble Plop Book
- Steve Alton &
- Nick Sharratt
Horrible Science Annual 2008
- Nick Arnold
Famously Foul Experiments
- Nick Arnold
What's Eating You?
- Nicola Davies &
- Neal Layton
The Global Garden
- Kate Petty &
- Jennie Maizels
Germ Stories
- Authur Kornberg &
- Adam Alaniz
The printed page was the primary source of information and inspiration in our childhoods. This is not so for today's children. Electronic media now compete with science books; the Internet and CD-ROMs being particularly well suited to the presentation of non-linear, non-narrative information. In response, authors and publishers have had to explore new formats for science books for the young. This special issue examines some of the exciting results.
The best science books engage, educate and inspire a child. And the most ambitious of these discuss the concepts and process of science, not just the facts. The educational brief is complicated by the ways in which different children respond to new information. For children who will sit for hours reading encyclopaedias, a new generation of reference books, rather than following the alphabetic imperative, present facts in categories and familiar contexts (see 'The scene is set', page 952). For children who are unlikely to seek out a book about science, some authors use stories (see 'Hawking's fact and fiction' and 'Stones, bones and stories', page 949, and 'Star Tales', page 950) and others use humour and questioning to make science more familiar (see 'Mathematics not Shopping', page 951).
Books that come with Internet links or CD-ROMs (see 'To bodily go ...', page 951) usually fail to integerate the printed and electronic page. Print endures much longer than the average URL, and web links in books even a couple of years old are often obsolete. More successful are the increasingly inventive pop-up books that encourage children to explore scientific knowledge. By using few words to convey each point and hiding information under flaps and in illustrations, pop-up books are both the precursors of and a response to multimedia's selectable links and embedded content.
Whatever the format, a truly inspirational book needs an author with a command of and love for the subject. Why is Snot Green? (8–14 years) by Glenn Murphy is an excellent example. Set out as a lively dialogue between Murphy and the reader as his questioner, it makes learning effortless and enjoyable. The questions range from space to biology and are so astute and well pitched that you soon forget you didn't ask them. The answers are satisfyingly rooted in everyday life. Most important, Murphy shows that questions are at the heart of the scientific approach. It is a modest book with no gimmicks and minimal graphics. Modest books rarely attract children, however, and so depend on an interested adult to get the child engaged.
Left to choose for themselves, children are drawn to attention-grabbing devices and publishers are becoming expert at exploiting this. We took six books into Brill Church of England Combined School in Buckinghamshire, England (see http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast). The class of 9–10-year olds was immediately attracted to The Gooey Chewy Rumble Plop Book by the grotesquely stretchy, sticky three-dimensional latex tongue set into its front cover.
This imaginatively engineered pop-up book follows the journey that food takes through our bodies. It mixes intelligent, easily digestible text with imaginative pictures. On opening one page, a larger-than-life mouth is projected at the reader; on another, there's an extendable small intestine. The gimmicks, although initially a distraction, are a real treat to explore — revealing lots of engaging facts under flaps.
Do all these bells and whistles help the child's understanding? When Charlotte, aged nine, was asked what she had learned from The Gooey Chewy Rumble Plop Book — her favourite — she replied “nothing”, and I suspect that her first encounter with the book was dominated by its visual inventiveness. The intention presumably is that a child taken with the physical experience of the book will return to it again and again, learning at each reading.
Over the past ten years, author Nick Arnold has made an industry out of appealing to children's sense of humour with the madcap, gory Horrible Science collection — selling 4 million copies in Britain alone. His latest, The Horrible Science Annual 2008 (8+ years) is crammed with facts — from the cell biology of neurons (the nervous system is described as a telephone exchange) to the fate of Einstein's brain after he died. These are delivered with energy and imagination in cartoons, summaries and activities. April, aged ten, said “they make you want to read on because they say funny things”; Joly, aged nine, described them as: “Perfectly presented, absolutely brilliant, very funny.”
Even more impressive is the collaboration between author Nicola Davies and illustrator Neal Layton. Their infectious enjoyment of zoology always yields fresh perspectives. Layton's illustrations are a natural foil to Davies's direct and surreptitiously informative books. Their most recent work, What's Eating You? (8+ years), is a delightfully quirky text on parasites in the language of everyday life (pictured). The reader gains a good sense of habitat, life-cycles, malaria, the importance of grooming and even impalas' bottoms. Davies and Layton get the balance right between wonderful presentation and inspiring wonder at nature. As nine-year-old Luke put it: “The pictures are great and the parasites are amazing.”
The frontier for pioneering authors and publishers, beyond the ever-popular dinosaurs and extant animals, is giving a feel for the nature of scientific research. Famously Foul Experiments (8–16 years) succeeds splendidly. Nick Arnold explores key experiments in the history of science using simple activities for the reader to do at home, short biographies of the scientists who first established the principles and a pithy explanation of the concepts. We are given Hubble and expanding balloons, Darwin and a game of natural selection using coloured paperclips, and Ibn Al-Haytham and the pinhole camera, to name just a few.
In The Global Garden (6–12 years) by Kate Petty and Jennie Maizels, garden gnomes bearing schematic molecules of carbon dioxide and water appear on a page of pop-up plant nutrition to illustrate photosynthesis in this delightful book on the origins of food and the global economy. It is exciting to see authors effortlessly including plant biochemistry and physiology as part of a broader story, much as they are in life. Six-year-old Nell and 13-year-old Floss were both delighted by the gnomes — illustrating how the very best books appeal to readers of all ages. Similarly, Arthur Kornberg — yes, of DNA synthesis fame — spans the generations in Germ Stories. This collection of cautionary verses on microbiology were originally written for his grandchildren and many of the rhyming couplets are a delight to child and adult.
Some cultural commentators say that books are enjoying their final years of supremacy. Whether this is the case or not, recent competition from the new media has only been a good thing for children's science publishing. Books such as the ones reviewed here make the case for a strong future for the printed page.
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Coles, H. Small matters, big issues. Nature 450, 946–947 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/450946a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/450946a
