Rosie Revere’s Big Project Book: a STEM Family review

Today we review Rosie Revere’s Big Project Book for Bold Engineers.

We were delighted to see a workbook version of the excellent Rosie Revere, Engineer storybook. We read it to our kids every week, and we love its focus on experimentation, dealing with failures, and trying out weird solutions to impossible problems.

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams; Act Csm edition (April 4, 2017)

Author: Andrea Beaty

Illustrator: David Roberts

The Big Project Book is full of open-ended creativity challenges to stimulate your kids ability to think about complex topics and to use their imagination to devise new solutions. It rewards experimentation, not necessarily finding the perfect answer.
The book embodies the lessons learned from the original Rosie Revere book, weaving Rosie’s spirit into its exercises.

How to use this book?

We encourage parents to design alongside their child with this book. The instructions and the challenges are tough. There’s no easy answers. As a parent, you can model the creative confidence, and open-ended problem-solving. By just picking up the pen and starting to sketch, brainstorm, or diagram out what might be possible, you can show your children how to start thinking through really hard problems, without expecting perfect instructions on getting the right answer.

What age is it good for?

We recommend this book for ages 5 to 12. Your five-year-old likely will be a little befuddled if you leave it with them, but if you can model the creativity and drawing, they’ll be able to follow along. We tried it out with our three-year-old, but he wasn’t able to focus and grasp challenges in the workbook. At that young age, it’s hard to think through the complex questions, though they love just to draw and think through a discussion with their parents (so maybe there is some value in just that).