Review Detail
Middle Grade Non-Fiction
720
Fantastic Tech Overview!
Overall rating
4.3
Writing Style
4.0
Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)
4.0
Learning Value
5.0
Tweens and teens have a lot of trouble envisioning the world without technology, so this is a fantastic overview to help them understand that phones weren't always the all powerful instruments that we can carry around in our pockets. Illustrated with engaging, comic style cartoons in pastel shades, young readers can start with the Manchester Mark 1 in 1949 and investigate a whole range of other technologies that have emerged, as well as ones that haven't been perfected yet.
There is a lot of information on a variety of topics. I loved the thumbnail sketches and brief information about people in the history of technology, spanning history from Al-Khwarizmi (780-850) to Joy Buolamwini, a "poet of code" born in 1989. There's a brief description of the development of the internet, and an intriguing discussion of what would happen if most of the computers stopped working, with an inset about the "Y2K" bug fear at the end of 1999!
Hackers, computer languages, spy cams, "the cloud", Google, fake news, emojis, 3-D printing, and pay walls are all discussed. This is worth buying for the thoughts about what the world will look like in ten years! I find that sort of prediction fascinating, especially since when I was in middle school, video phone calls were viewed as the farthest flung possibility of technology... but no one ever mentioned having a computer small enough to carry with us all the time.
There is a lot of information on a variety of topics. I loved the thumbnail sketches and brief information about people in the history of technology, spanning history from Al-Khwarizmi (780-850) to Joy Buolamwini, a "poet of code" born in 1989. There's a brief description of the development of the internet, and an intriguing discussion of what would happen if most of the computers stopped working, with an inset about the "Y2K" bug fear at the end of 1999!
Hackers, computer languages, spy cams, "the cloud", Google, fake news, emojis, 3-D printing, and pay walls are all discussed. This is worth buying for the thoughts about what the world will look like in ten years! I find that sort of prediction fascinating, especially since when I was in middle school, video phone calls were viewed as the farthest flung possibility of technology... but no one ever mentioned having a computer small enough to carry with us all the time.
Good Points
An index at the end will help readers find the exact topic they were thinking about, and the table of contents is helpful as well. In general, though, this is more of a "fun fact" book to read for an overview of tech history, since the snippets are fairly short and don't have quite enough information for research projects, although this would be a good starting point.
Ignotofsky's The History of the Computer (2022) is a more comprehensive look at computer history, but it is also rather dense, so this is an awesome book for anyone interested in technology. I still have two books from the early 2000s on the history of the internet and personal computer, and they're great for the early history. There have been so many innovations since that time, and it's such an important topic for young readers to understand. This was so well done that I may have to pick up this publisher's books on Science and The Universe, although I think I'll pass on Philosophy.
Ignotofsky's The History of the Computer (2022) is a more comprehensive look at computer history, but it is also rather dense, so this is an awesome book for anyone interested in technology. I still have two books from the early 2000s on the history of the internet and personal computer, and they're great for the early history. There have been so many innovations since that time, and it's such an important topic for young readers to understand. This was so well done that I may have to pick up this publisher's books on Science and The Universe, although I think I'll pass on Philosophy.
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