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Edutainment Books
So recently I read Math Girls and Lauren Ipsum, two books that would be termed "edutainment" if they were video games, and they were interesting both in-and-of-themselves and also in how they tackled the question of "how do you relate a large quantity of technical information in novel form" so I'm-a blab about them here a bit.
Math Girls is quite thin on plot—it's really just "math nerd dorks over math by tutoring one chick and getting his ass mathematically kicked by the other chick," so don't believe any of that shit on the cover about it being a "bittersweet" story—it's functional, and it makes the math feel cuter and more intimate, but this book is much more about the math than any plot. And the math can get pretty dense/tricky at times—you could certainly just read the math bits through casually/quickly without checking all the details, and get the generally idea/gist of the proofs, but to get the most out of the book, you'll probably want to slow down and work through the math with the characters and some spare pen & paper—though either works, I think, depending on how much effort you want to invest. For the first portion of the book it feels pretty episodic, with each new chunk of math-y info feeling pretty unrelated (evidently the novel was originally published as a series of short stories, so this makes sense), but it gets really cute later on when the book's three main characters start approaching the same problems from very different starting points, and you can see how each of their approaches can all reach the same end even though they look wildly different.
I probably appreciated the way that the book showed the process of doing math, as opposed to any of the actual math it shows (which is why I think reading lightly probably works just as well as scribbling along in your notebook, even though I did the scribbling, haha). One of the "math girls" is Tetra, who seeks math tutoring from the narrator and, despite not being particularly good at math, really wants to be good at it. Half the questions that came out of her mouth were things I had asked at some point. I recall getting very annoyed in my first proof-y math class when I asked mathier friends for help; when I asked how I was supposed to do problem so-and-so, the response was some form of "have you tried thinking about the problem real hard" and/or a link to the Feynman Algorithm, har de har. What I was grasping for was a formula, an algorithm to execute, some kind of straightforward process I could follow, because that was how math had always worked for me before—but after a certain point that's not really how it's done. It's sitting around staring at the page, trying to reframe the problem or try a really basic dumb case, thinking about how a few related proofs might apply to this problem, etc. etc.—and the book both shows this and conveys how exciting the process can be. It's probably best read by folks high school age or up, especially those who really dig math, or people who would like to really dig math but don't see the appeal.
Lauren Ipsum is different in that it's quite obviously targeted at a younger demographic; I'm pretty sure the writer stated somewhere that he's looking at the 5-to-12-year-old crowd. I know that I rather liked it, though it's hard for me to tell how much that counts for—I already knew all the concepts being presented in the book inside-and-out, and it's littered with little CS-nerd-themed inside jokes that I was chuckling along with. It's essentially a very short, but rather cute, Alice in Wonderland-esque adventure in which the obstacles/challenges the hero faces are solved by "thinking like a programmer"—designing algorithms (presented as "poems" in the book), coming up with the idea for a timing attack on-the-fly when faced with some obnoxious guards, and so on. But yeah, it's hard for me to tell whether young folk would find it similarly charming and enlightening. How does child psychology work I have no idea.
Anyway, these books reminded me a bit of Sophie's World, a novel I read back in middle school that basically tries to give the entirety of the history of Western philosophy in some 500-odd pages. That one is a bit strange in that it feels like "here is a section of philosophy textbook, here is a section of novel, here is another textbook section"—mind, it's a really well-written, conversational textbook, and the author does start tying the philosophy-history bits into the plot near the end—it's a sort of wonky and ultra-meta tie-in that didn't really work for me, but they do end up complementing each other.
Of the three, Sophie's World felt the lumpiest/chunkiest/most awkward in the novel format, and Lauren Ipsum felt the breeziest (while still managing to pack in some good info!), but Math Girls was probably the most impressive by making some pretty heavy math at least kind-of accessible within an novel framework. I guess there's not much money to be made in the edutainment genre, and it's probably really tricky to do well, but I'd appreciate more books like these; I find them pretty cute & interesting on the whole.
Math Girls is quite thin on plot—it's really just "math nerd dorks over math by tutoring one chick and getting his ass mathematically kicked by the other chick," so don't believe any of that shit on the cover about it being a "bittersweet" story—it's functional, and it makes the math feel cuter and more intimate, but this book is much more about the math than any plot. And the math can get pretty dense/tricky at times—you could certainly just read the math bits through casually/quickly without checking all the details, and get the generally idea/gist of the proofs, but to get the most out of the book, you'll probably want to slow down and work through the math with the characters and some spare pen & paper—though either works, I think, depending on how much effort you want to invest. For the first portion of the book it feels pretty episodic, with each new chunk of math-y info feeling pretty unrelated (evidently the novel was originally published as a series of short stories, so this makes sense), but it gets really cute later on when the book's three main characters start approaching the same problems from very different starting points, and you can see how each of their approaches can all reach the same end even though they look wildly different.
I probably appreciated the way that the book showed the process of doing math, as opposed to any of the actual math it shows (which is why I think reading lightly probably works just as well as scribbling along in your notebook, even though I did the scribbling, haha). One of the "math girls" is Tetra, who seeks math tutoring from the narrator and, despite not being particularly good at math, really wants to be good at it. Half the questions that came out of her mouth were things I had asked at some point. I recall getting very annoyed in my first proof-y math class when I asked mathier friends for help; when I asked how I was supposed to do problem so-and-so, the response was some form of "have you tried thinking about the problem real hard" and/or a link to the Feynman Algorithm, har de har. What I was grasping for was a formula, an algorithm to execute, some kind of straightforward process I could follow, because that was how math had always worked for me before—but after a certain point that's not really how it's done. It's sitting around staring at the page, trying to reframe the problem or try a really basic dumb case, thinking about how a few related proofs might apply to this problem, etc. etc.—and the book both shows this and conveys how exciting the process can be. It's probably best read by folks high school age or up, especially those who really dig math, or people who would like to really dig math but don't see the appeal.
Lauren Ipsum is different in that it's quite obviously targeted at a younger demographic; I'm pretty sure the writer stated somewhere that he's looking at the 5-to-12-year-old crowd. I know that I rather liked it, though it's hard for me to tell how much that counts for—I already knew all the concepts being presented in the book inside-and-out, and it's littered with little CS-nerd-themed inside jokes that I was chuckling along with. It's essentially a very short, but rather cute, Alice in Wonderland-esque adventure in which the obstacles/challenges the hero faces are solved by "thinking like a programmer"—designing algorithms (presented as "poems" in the book), coming up with the idea for a timing attack on-the-fly when faced with some obnoxious guards, and so on. But yeah, it's hard for me to tell whether young folk would find it similarly charming and enlightening. How does child psychology work I have no idea.
Anyway, these books reminded me a bit of Sophie's World, a novel I read back in middle school that basically tries to give the entirety of the history of Western philosophy in some 500-odd pages. That one is a bit strange in that it feels like "here is a section of philosophy textbook, here is a section of novel, here is another textbook section"—mind, it's a really well-written, conversational textbook, and the author does start tying the philosophy-history bits into the plot near the end—it's a sort of wonky and ultra-meta tie-in that didn't really work for me, but they do end up complementing each other.
Of the three, Sophie's World felt the lumpiest/chunkiest/most awkward in the novel format, and Lauren Ipsum felt the breeziest (while still managing to pack in some good info!), but Math Girls was probably the most impressive by making some pretty heavy math at least kind-of accessible within an novel framework. I guess there's not much money to be made in the edutainment genre, and it's probably really tricky to do well, but I'd appreciate more books like these; I find them pretty cute & interesting on the whole.