Although Inventions is designed for 8 year olds and up, this title has had an extraordinary history and following. It has been used at MIT to mentor high school students in physics. It has been used at U.C. Berkeley to mentor women in science. It has been used similarly at other institutions including Fermi Lab and the University of Texas at Austin. We heard rumors, that at one point, a number of physicists at Berkeley were spinning the hand made motors from Inventions on their desks, competing for the bragging rights as to whose was spinning the fastest. 

Inventions received a rave review from the Women's Society of the IEEE. They used Inventions for camp programs for elementary school students. The review boasted: "The projects actually WORK"....even for large groups where individualized attention is not possible. 

We have discovered directly through our own camp programs that Inventions is compelling to children. We run a very popular Electric Car Summer Camp in Berkeley where students design and build their own go-cart sized Electric cars. This camp is so popular that many students repeat it year after year. We sometimes use our ScienceWiz kits as prizes for camp contests. Many campers have reported to us that they had been given the Inventions kit as a gift when they were five, six or seven. With more or less help from their parents, they had completed at least some of the projects. A surprising number of campers also told us that they had purchased the kit again when they were older, because they wanted to do the projects completely on their own, without so much 'help' from their parents. Perhaps this is how we all learn best, learning and then learning it again, with ever deepening comprehension. 

* The art used in this book was derived from a project which was funded by the National Science Foundation.