The Inventor’s Workshop, STEM-fun for potato chip and cat video kids

The potato chip and cat video test is gauging whether or not a kid will want to read a book based on just one page. Because, much like a potato chip or a cat video, you can’t eat or watch just one. Some might relate better to the M&M or slice of pizza test, but the latter is far too large for repeated snacking, isn’t it?  The Inventor’s Workshop: How People and Machines Transformed Each Other is a wonderful book that crosses through reference material, a loose time travelling narrative, countless blurbs of digestible information and detailed illustrations that channel a search for a lanky, bespectacled, poofy-haired, Brit who is hiding in plain sight.

The book’s cover channels a Rube Goldberg thing that could include hundreds of inventions you’re supposed to find. I see a boom box. I see bicycles that are turning a large turbine that looks like it’s powering a remote arm that’s moving dozens of gears that are playing some music. I see another boom box. Its cover is even more attractive because certain illustrations like the water, roof of the birdhouse or computer screen are glossy and reflect light. The book’s main title, The Inventor’s Workshop, physically pops off of the page just a little bit and is reflective. It’s impossible to not touch it, we tried, and failed miserably.

The premise of The Inventor’s Workshop is that ‘inventing’ something is never done by one person. I just asked a student who invented the telephone, and after a moment to wonder why they were being asked this in computer class they said “Alexander Bell.” I said no, it’s Alexander Graham Bell, but before him there was an Italian inventor, Antonio Meucci who was able to add sound to his telegraph in 1856. This happened five years before Bell’s invention. The telephone then morphed through switchboards, helped the Allied forces in WWI, and established a direct line to emergency services. Things really changed in the early 1980’s when Laila Ohlgren started working on the first mobile phone network. By now that student had left the room in confusion as to why this middle-aged man was busting his chops.

That’s a six-page spread that shows the evolution of the telephone. It’ll be interesting to elementary and middle school ages because it acknowledges the basics of the technology, but also serves up dozens of other facts that they (as well as many middle or high school students) hadn’t heard of. Kids, regardless of their age, love to be the ones to share factoids in the “didjya know” category. The Inventor’s Workshop has nine other technological innovations and gives them the same, detailed, fun treatment.

Ages eight and up can turn to any page, learn something, and be entertained in a way that makes them want to experience more. It can be challenging to get school-age children to want to learn. They need to learn, and the more that they learn the better it is for them. It’s under the same philosophy as ‘you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink’, but with more of a delayed gratification theme. If you can get a kid to want to love to learn, to love to learn, or to engage in effortless education then you’re looking at someone who’ll have the keys to the kingdom in a decade.

The Inventor’s Workshop also channels the cat video challenge, but through a STEM-lens. Try to turn to just one page in the book without thumbing through other pages, you can’t. You’re busy paying bills or avoiding homework, you open the book to one page, but then you go to another, and now you’re reading it. Stop the insanity already and just enjoy the book, don’t try to fight it. The Inventor’s Workshop is geared for ages eight and up, but those who are slightly younger, as well as, those who are older, and much older will enjoy it too.

The Inventor’s Workshop: How People and Machines Transformed Each Other is by Ruth Amos, with illustrations by Stacey Thomas and is available on Magic Cat Publishing, an imprint of Abrams Books.

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