This worthy sequel makes learning chemistry fun with a quartet of inventive board games.
A workbook teaches readers how to balance chemical equations.
This follow-up to Chemistry Games: Volume 1 (2011) gives readers an enjoyable way to study a complex subject. Providing four board games, the volume focuses on teaching students about stoichiometry and the law of conservation of mass. It also seeks to help them memorize the periodic table. Once again, each board is made up of colored squares on the “Outer Path,” which list the elements that each player needs to collect to balance a series of stipulated chemical reaction equations. Players move their pieces on the blank squares of the “Inner Path” by selecting Step Cards. The cards are marked with an element, such as carbon, along with its chemical symbol, atomic number, and the number of protons it has. These games also include Claim Cards, which provide the answers for how to balance the equations in the “Outer Path.” Each board comes with its own periodic table, broken into four sections by the “valence,” or combining power, of the elements. The games are specifically aimed at students who are taking chemistry either at the high school or college level, but they may also be valuable for readers who wish to brush up on the basic, foundational elements of the subject. To anyone else, the offerings will probably be incomprehensible. Gebhart’s (2 Lives in 3 Acts, 2017, etc.) determination to make chemistry accessible and interesting for students, especially by presenting them with a new challenge to explore, is admirable. Best of all, his games can all be reproduced and distributed by educators looking for an innovative way to keep their chemistry classes engaged with the topic. The imaginative work should be especially useful for students struggling with the material in their chemistry classes, who may not expect the curriculum to be amenable to games. The volume subverts the belief that learning the hard sciences has to be difficult or laborious.
This worthy sequel makes learning chemistry fun with a quartet of inventive board games.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4611-3894-5
Page Count: 54
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Lively writing and colorful anecdotes enhance this insightful look at an unexpected side of agriculture.
We’ve cultivated plants since the dawn of time; but all along, the plants have been cultivating us as well.
Pollan (A Place of My Own, 1997) uses four plant species to support his thesis: apples, tulips, cannabis, and potatoes. Each, by offering some quality that we humans find valuable, has managed to propagate itself throughout the world. In the process, each has generated more than its share of fascinating lore. Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) has become an icon of early American enterprise, creating orchards out of untamed forest. But the apples Chapman planted were meant not for eating, but for cider, the ubiquitous tipple of early America. Only when temperance began to give the apple a bad name did orchardmen switch to the sweet varieties for eating. The tulip boom in early 18th-century Holland saw prize bulbs selling for the price of a fashionable house in Amsterdam. Now, ironically, the plant that commands high prices in Amsterdam is marijuana, over the last few decades the focus of some of the most intense research in the botanical sciences (most of it conducted indoors, away from official eyes). The humble potato, for its part, has come a long way since its origins as an Andean weed: The russet Burbank, for example, which yields perfect fries for the fast-food trade, dominates the US market almost to the exclusion of all other taters, and its cultivation depends heavily on chemicals nastier than anything the cannabis bud secretes. Pollan keeps the reader aware of how the plants induce us to spread their genetic material to new environments—and how the preservation of natural variability is a key to keeping them (and us) healthy.
Lively writing and colorful anecdotes enhance this insightful look at an unexpected side of agriculture.Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50129-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A penetrating look at the bitter controversy between animal rights activists and research scientists over the use of monkeys and chimpanzees in medical research. Given their proven intelligence, asks the author, can a chimp or monkey ``comprehend that it is being used by another species? It is not a question everyone wants to see answered.'' Blum, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Sacramento Bee articles that led to this book, acknowledges that in tracing the history of primate research- -and she discusses several horrendous abuses—any accounting ``must include the knowledge gained, the human lives saved.'' But some researchers who recognize the animals' suffering and strive for more humane handling, such as Roger Fouts at Central Washington University, find themselves ostracized and refused government funding. Fouts, renowned for his sign language work with the chimp Washoe, has battled the National Institutes of Health for years, finally filing suit to challenge its way of regulating experimental animal facilities. His 1986 visit, along with famed chimpanzee specialist Jane Goodall, to a notorious Maryland laboratory conducting AIDS research brought enough negative publicity to force some changes in the way the animals are caged. Other researchers, like Tom Gordon, director at Yerkes Field Station (a ``monkey farm'' in Georgia), fault both animal activists ``for making the monkeys too human'' and scientists for treating them as mere mechanical objects. Primates' humanlike physiology (a chimp's DNA is 98.5% identical to a human's) renders them perhaps indispensable in AIDS research and other crucial medical experiments. But, as Blum shows, it is their humanlike nature and their intelligence that give rise to important questions about ethics and respect for life. As a solution, Blum has nothing better to offer than a vague suggestion for ``education programs'' aimed at reaching a ``troubled'' middle ground. But she brings the issues into sharp, disturbing focus.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-509412-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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