Category Archives: Age 8 to 11

Do Try This at Home: Cook It! – Jon Milton ***

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This is a bit of an oddity, and I can’t help but suspect someone somewhere had a meeting and said ‘Science books for kids don’t sell very well. But cookery books do sell well. So Screenshot_16_05_2013_17_18let’s do a cookery book and sneak a bit of science into it. As such it does kind of work, but it could have been a lot better.

Most of the book is really just a basic kid’s cook book. Nothing wrong with that – it just isn’t particularly relevant to a science site. They do stick in little comment boxes to tell you the ‘science bit’, but it’s rather like those cosmetic adverts – the science bit doesn’t really explain itself very well. So, for instance, we are told that when you cook an egg the proteins in it change. Fine and dandy – but we aren’t told what proteins are, why they change and why this results in the effects we see. It is information with no context and hence relatively little value.

Slightly better are a series of experiments at the back of the book that let you make an indicator with red cabbage or see what happens when you put a pen into a jar of rice. But they aren’t quite enough to save the book. It’s fine if you want a nice children’s cookbook – but it’s no challenger for Horrible Science. (And I find it really irritating it spends so long advertising the Science Museum’s madcap (ahem) ‘punk science’ team. Grow up lads.)

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Review by Jo Reed

Supergeek! Dinosaurs, Brains and Supertrains – Glenn Murphy ***

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There’s nothing children’s science likes better than a format – and that’s what this book is all about. It’s the first of a ‘Supergeek!’ series, with the format consisting of (in Screenshot_03_05_2013_16_23this case) four sections of questions, followed by rather more detailed answers. The sections seem pretty well randomly cobbled together – for the first title they are dinosaurs; brains, senses and feelings; earthquakes, volcanoes and natural disasters; and trains, planes and transport. Yes, the theme is ‘no theme.’

I’ll be honest, it doesn’t work wonderfully well for me. You can in principle read the second half as a book, but it is a very plonking book because it is a set of entries that happen to be answers to fairly random questions. As for the quiz part, it seems a bit laboured, merely requiring the reader to have memorised a whole string of facts, rather than work anything out, geek style. And some of these ‘facts’ are fairly uninspiring. Do we really care how many rotor blades there are on a standard Bell helicopter?

If you are the kind of young reader who likes working through a quiz, popping to the back of the book to check your own answers, then this will appeal (though even you might be baffled by the selection of topics), and inevitably it will be bought by a fair number of aunties. But I don’t think it’s much of a challenger to the likes of the Horrible Science series.

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Review by Jo Reed

Chemistry (getting a big reaction) – Dan Green & Basher ***

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We’ve not been awfully kind about some of the predecessors of these strange little illustrated science books ‘created by Basher’ (whatever that means). The format is odd – very small in many cases (they do have some larger editions, but this isn’t one of them), half the space given up to illustrations that don’t add any information whatever, and a really irritating text that is written in the first person, apparently by the subject of the page. So in this case you will see entries by a molecule, an acid and so on. Cringeworthy.

But having said all that, for some reason, the chemistry entry didn’t seem anywhere near as bad as some of the others. I think the reason is that there is a lot more useful text than in some examples. It does really tell you quite a bit about, say, acids, even if it is with that irritating first person spin.

The book doesn’t limit itself to the chemicals and their components – there are sections on lab equipment, reactions and more.

Despite my relative enthusiasm, I can’t bring myself to be too positive, though. The text is too sophisticated for the age group the design seems aimed at – it’s a bit like the South Park of children’s popular science books (without the rude bits). So I’d say the text is probably 9 to 12 (apart from the first person aspect) while the design is more 6 to 9. Oh, well. It’s definitely an improvement on some of the others.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Crackling Chemistry – Steve Parker ***

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Like the other books in this ‘Science Crackers’ series, Crackling Chemistry consists of a series of well-illustrated double page spreads, combining factoids, more detailed information, photographs and diagrams in the typical, rather messy scrapbook style. Interlaced with the information pages are five double page spreads of ‘hands on’ activities. You have to be fairly easily pleased to describe them as ‘fantastic’ as the cover does – I’d be more inclined to call them safe and simple. The closest we get to exciting is a vinegar and baking powder volcano. It’s also the closest we get to chemistry.

This is because, remarkably, there is hardly any chemistry in the book. In part this is, I suspect, a side effect of the national curriculum in the UK for this age of children. That too has hardly any chemistry. Instead we get a good few pages on materials, whether things are hard and soft and mixtures. We then move onto freezing and boiling, states of matter, heat and conductivity. Unless I missed it there was no mention of elements, compounds, reactions and… well, pretty well all of chemistry.

It’s not a bad book – but it really should be Marvellous Materials, or even A Bit More Physics, rather than Crackling Chemistry.

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Review by Jo Reed

Spacecraft and the Journey into Space – Raman Prinja ***

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Space travel is the ultimate mix of potential excitement and factual disappointment, so it’s a difficult one to get the balance right. The fact is it’s very difficult to get out into space, and even harder to get out of the solar system (in terms of doing it in a practical time). Raman Prinja’s slim volume for children gets the balance pretty much right. At this age, you’ve got to get plenty of excitement in there – but there needs to be some realism too.

I like the way the book starts with telescopes, which gives the vast majority of our ‘exploration’ of space and probably always will. And there’s a fair summary of what we’ve achieved (though I think there could have been a bit more on the Voyager missions, especially as Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system around the time the book was written). There could have been a bit more too on future possibilities, I think. To suggest solar sails could get a spacecraft to ‘super fast speeds’ is probably impractical – they seem much more the canal barge of space – and I’d have liked to have seen some serious future spaceship engines and perhaps even a bit about the speculative warp drive.

There are a few, rather low key activities like making a rainbow (why?) and a balloon rocket. These perhaps could have been beefed up a bit. The cover’s a bit dull too – in fact, the real thing was rather more murky than the image shown here.

Overall an entirely acceptable addition to the ‘The Universe Rocks’ series, but probably not the most outstanding.

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Review by Jo Reed

Fizzing Physics – Steve Parker ***

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Another in the ‘Science Crackers’ series, I was rather less impressed by the physics title than I was by that on astronomy. It doesn’t help that physics is probably the worst handled science subject in the primary school curriculum, and the series is quite strongly curriculum driven. But it’s more than that – I think it took the wrong way in.

In effect we lead into physics with engineering – the first two page spread is on machines. But this misses the point of what physics is about. It would have been much better to have lead on stuff – what matter is – also part of the curriculum and real physics.

That apart there are the usual topics you would expect (too much of the things you would expect for me) – forces, friction, light, sound, electricity and magnetism, but each is covered in a very summary way, so summary in fact that most of the essentials are avoided. Occasionally this even goes as far as getting the science wrong. So, for instance, we are told mirrors flip left and right. They don’t. More often it is just clumsy representation. So light, for instance, is only really described as ‘rays’ no mention of photons or waves. And the separate sections on electricity and magnetism give no suggestion that there is any relation between the two.

It’s not a disaster. There’s a fair amount of the basics, and the little hands-on activities are quite entertaining. But it could have been so much better. In essence it ignores the good bits, keeps the boring bits, then over-simplifies them until they are almost not there. Again, it’s partly the curriculum to blame – but only partly.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Bubbling Biology – Steve Parker ****

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It’s likely that this 32 page, medium format heavily illustrated book was primarily produced for the education market, but we don’t need to hold that against it, as it is still content-packed and made interesting enough to give to a curious young reader as well.

The title is biology, but the content is rather more about natural history – something I suspect that is imposed by an attempt to match the UK national curriculum. This means there are lots of good basics about animals and plants. Apart from the creatures themselves we look at senses, feeding and respiration, reproduction and survival. This is all served up in pages with little bite sized chunks of text and good illustrations, mostly photographic, but with drawings in the activity sections.

These are surprisingly good with the inevitable sprouting of seeds in a jam jar (come on, you couldn’t miss that) but also rather more surprising some experiments on reflexes and on optical illusions to explore the senses a little. Good fun.

My main regret is that we don’t get any of what are probably the two core strands of biology now – molecular biology and evolution. Neither gets a mention. So nothing about DNA or genetics, no explanation of where all those animals and plants came from. It’s a shame.

Overall, though, given the limitations of the topic, a sound and entertaining effort.

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Review by Jo Reed

Awesome Astronomy – Raman Prinja ****

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Part of the Science Crackers series (I think in the sense of ‘being a cracker’ rather than ‘being crackers’), this is a slim large format book introducing the basics of astronomy. Each page contains a mix of text and illustrations, combining lively drawn images with some good photographs. It works well as a basic introduction to astronomy, with a mix of informative sections with opportunities for hands-on activity, from making your own craters to projecting constellations. It’s a shame, though, there wasn’t a lot about hands on astronomy – actually going out there and looking at things.

Mostly the book works well. The content is sound, though can be a bit plonking, defining what stuff is without much in the way of storytelling. There are plenty of facts, but I would have liked a bit more finesse. Sometimes things could do with a little more information too – so we are told, for instance that constellations are patterns people saw in the way stars are grouped together – it would have been good to say they aren’t actually grouped that way, they just happen to look that way from where we’re standing.

Overall it’s a good little book with plenty of content.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Robots (Discover Science) – Clive Gifford ***

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What we have here is a colourful, approachable easy-to-read collection of mini-articles on different types of robots. Each two page spread covers a topic and typically has three examples of the robot in question. So, for instance, we’ve got sections on robot arms, robot insects and robots in space.

The illustrations are clear, big and colourful, but in the end a little dull. And that’s the only problem with the book as a whole. It is a perfectly reasonable catalogue of different kinds of robot, but in the end they get rather samey, and there’s no story to it, no chronology, nothing to give it much to keep you reading.

At the back are a couple of ‘fun and easy projects’ – making a ‘robot arm’, acting like a robot and making a sub-Blue Peter robot model. The content is fine, with the possible exception of the domestic robots spread, where we see a very unlikely robot waiter, but we don’t see the only domestic robots that have sold in any numbers – vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers (perhaps because they look rather boring). But it’s just not a book I can get excited about. And somehow, having been brought up on Robby the robot, K9, R2D2 and C3PO (daleks are not robots, please note Mr Gifford) this was something of a disappointment.

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Review by Jo Reed

Light and Sound (Discovery Science) – Mike Goldsmith ***

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Inside this slim, medium format book (bigger than an ordinary book, smaller than coffee table) the target audience of key stage two (the older part of primary school) are introduced to two scientific topics – light and sound. From a physics point of view, putting these together is a bit odd, as they aren’t related in any way, but from an anthropomorphic viewpoint they are linked by our senses, so it’s no great surprise.

We get a section on each of light and sound, heavily illustrated with photographs, and with a text that is simple (and large) enough to be comfortable for an eight-year-old. This is followed by a handful of rather uninspiring activities (when compared with something like Science Experiments) like making shadow puppets and a string-and-cup telephone. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the science in the light and sound sections, though sound is handled a little better in that it we are first told what it is, while we are never told anything about what light is.

The only problem I have with the content is that it is overly descriptive without explanation (classic Victorian approach, as science often is for younger readers). So, for instance, we are told how three pigment colours (sadly red, yellow and blue rather than the correct magenta, yellow and cyan) mix to make all the colours, and how three light colours (red, green and blue) similarly make all the colours, but never why this is the case – why pigments give us the impression of colour – still very basic stuff, but too explanatory for this approach.

I don’t in any way blame the author or the publisher – this is the fault of the UK national curriculum, which this book is clearly designed to fit, which takes a very old fashioned view of science in junior schools (in part, I suspect, because most junior school teachers are arts graduates).

This is a sound book that does the job it sets out to do – and is fine for the task – but it’s a shame about the straightjacket of the curriculum.

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Review by Brian Clegg