Children are natural scientists – their budding minds brim with questions, and they're prone to experimentation, poking and prodding the world around them to see what happens. Just watching a baby push toys off the edge of a high chair can be an inspiring experience, because you can see the way repetition allows the child to formulate theories about cause (push block!) and effect (block falls!).
We love to see books that encourage children's innate enthusiasm for exploration and demonstrate that science is for everyone. For instance, Six Dots: A Story of Young Louis Braille, by Jen Bryant and Boris Kulikov, depicts the why and how of a young inventor at work; for younger readers, Gus's Garage, by Leo Timmers, promotes tinkering and the do-it-yourself ethos that drives the development of scientific tools from telescopes to microarrays. The Watcher: Jane Goodall's Life with the Chimps, by Jeanette...
University of California Press