Playwiths

This is brain food, distilled from a web site that drew over 4 million visitors in the 1990s. It is a tool for all home-schoolers including modern instant and involuntary home-schoolers, but mainly, this is fun for humans.

This is a practical introduction to the art of curiosity across Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics, or STEAM to the cognoscenti.

Brought out in a rush during the first Covid lockdown, I tired of po-faced idiot commercial publishers who could not see how useful this would be for kids and minders.

The book aims to nurture curiosity, wisdom and joy in learning. There are no po-faced lists of "facts" to be learned. The author pulls faces at all such books! No prior knowledge is required of readers, but the author's prior knowledge is clear: each and every one of the 300+ activities and explorations described here has been used by the author many times before. The image on the cover is a grand daughter operating a turbine.

A friend's husband took over her copy, saying "this was written for retired engineers". It wasn't, but if your mind is active, you will find joy here. From balsa-wood planes to cryptography, from limerick-writing to musical instruments, from optical illusions to sundials, bubbles and pet pillbugs, paradoxes, puzzles and games: there's something for everybody.

Where to get it:

There are two choices:

 An ebook in full colour for Kindle; $5 and

 

A print-on-demand paperback.  $25 (no colour)

The base page for all of these books is here.