I enlisted my fourteen-year-old for this hands-on review of Cool Cir­cuits by Susan Mar­tineau and Nick Bushell, part of the Awe­some Activ­i­ties series from Wind­mill Books.  We had a fun evening with the exper­i­ments and some off­shoots of our own.

My first crit­i­cism of the book is that it jumps straight into projects with­out an intro­duc­tory sec­tion on sup­plies and gen­eral need to know. The shop­ping part might seem minor, but it was not. A list at the begin­ning of the book of all the sup­plies would have been nice as would accept­able sub­sti­tutes (see croc­o­dile clips below). The Radio Shack clos­est to our house just closed so we attempted two nearby hard­ware stores first before head­ing across town to Radio Shack. We were ulti­mately suc­cess­ful at Radio Shack, but the oft-required croc­o­dile clips with attached wires were nowhere to be found. Explicit direc­tions for attach­ing wires to alli­ga­tor clips would have been a most wel­come addi­tion to the book.

The exper­i­ments are all pretty straight for­ward and ulti­mately sat­is­fy­ing when the lights came on. Where the direc­tions writ­ten clearly? Yes. Does that mean every­thing went smoothly? No. The nature of doing sci­ence exper­i­ments at home (at least this home) is that my son would jump ahead with his infer­ences. (He is old enough and the volt­age of every­thing we used low enough that I had no safety con­cerns) As with Col­or­ful Cir­cuit in the photo, this was not always a good idea. We blew out some LED lights along the way.The exper­i­ments build in com­plex­ity so they are best done in order, but the direc­tions are clear enough so that is not nec­es­sary. And let’s be hon­est, this is a book for home use and many kids will want to jump around from project to project based on what catches their fancy. We pur­chased a 4-colour LED and that was ulti­mately the most inter­est­ing to use in the light­ing experiments.

Over­all, I would rec­om­mend Col­or­ful  Cir­cuits. In addi­tion to the exper­i­ments, there are inter­est­ing side­bars on every page explain­ing the sci­ence behind the project, shar­ing tid­bits about inven­tors and sug­gest­ing ways to tweak the projects for slightly dif­fer­ent results. As with any sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy book, I believe the true test is what hap­pens after the book is closed. In the case of Cool Cir­cuits, my son headed off to overnight camp two days later with a bag full of bits and bobs to try to make his own fan to escape the heat wave. Score!

Head over to Check It Out! for more Non­fic­tion Mon­day posts.