How Poop Can Save The World, STEM-minded mental martial arts with a laugh

Most fifth and fourth-grade boys have one thing on their minds. Well, video games certainly occupy a segment of their cranial space, but there’s always one portion of grey matter that is at the ready with some bathroom humor. A fart noise, poop metaphor, bathroom memory, or something else wasteful is the currency for boys at a certain stage of their life. It’s disgusting, yes. However, Dog Man and Captain Underpants are successful at hitting those ages for a reason. They embrace that baseness and run with it. How Poop Can Save The World is a chapter book that’s geared for those ages, and slightly higher, that makes no apologies for its pictures of flying poop, stool-powered puns, or any other way to make readers smile about number two.

What How Poop Can Save The World does well is that it’s entertaining. Cover to cover, from the flying, cape-wearing poop that’s on the cover of the book to the sheer number of jokes that kids will discover inside there is something for everyone, even those who don’t find potty humor interesting. The book also infuses potty education, the science of waste, urine-powered cell phones, and more to bait the hook even further. Do not tell young readers this……but it’s actually a STEM chapter book, with as many nuggets of education, as there are instances of laughter.

It’s similar to the underlying principle of martial arts of taking an opponent’s force or momentum and using it against them. In this case, you’re taking the fact that kids want to talk about poop and urine, but channeling it through a STEM lens to make it educational. The text and illustrations in the book make it fun, now all you have to do is have kids look at the vessel.

How Poop Can Save The World channels the same popcorn bits of information that make Nat Geo Kids so irresistible for those ages. Three billion gallons of urine are produced daily on the planet. All Nippon Airways discovered that putting rabbit poop in its airplane fuel makes for less carbon dioxide emissions. Ancient Romans used pigeon poop to dye their hair blond.

You can’t stop reading these facts. A Tiger Toilet isn’t one specifically for the stripped jungle cats. It’s a toilet that has tiger worms in its bottom. The tiger worms turn human poop into compost after half a year and this toilet is used in remote parts of the world. Really, someone come take this book away from me….

The book is playfully written, broken up into chapters, and really gets kids thinking. The final chapter touches on aspects that they’ve never thought about like what happens to the human waste that’s on the moon, liquid hydrogen, and other STEM things. How Poop Can Save The World speaks to kids in a language that they understand and in the vernacular that they’re in for that period of time. It won’t speak to every kid, but for those who can’t stop talking about potty activities, it just might get them to think about the powers that poop can provide.

How Poop Can Save The World And Other Cool Fuels To Power Our Planet is by John Townsend with illustrations by Steve Brown and is available on Welbeck Publishing.

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