Engineered!: Engineering Design at Work

I bought this as part of the 4th grade science curriculum from Blossom and Root. We haven’t even started yet and both of my kids are fascinated. I love the outline of the engineering process in the beginning. They love the “gross” problems that were solved (printing a skin substitute, solving a sewage problem), and it is really a great educational resource. The illustrations are fun and colorful so it helps hold their interest. The explanations are easy to understand. Highly recommend.

My daughter is an elementary teacher and I sent it to her 3 rd grade son. He seems interested in science and engineering. My daughter told me he seems to enjoy the book.

My boy absolutely loves this book!

One's first reaction to this book might well be that it's a bit heavy on the cute illustrations and a bit light on content, but on a closer look that's not at all the case.The drawings have a busy, "Where's Waldo?", look, but there's a lot going on in them and they are worth careful examination. Once you get the way the individual chapters are organized, everything else falls into place.Each chapter emphasizes a different branch of engineering. We start with a stated problem that requires an engineering solution. We define and investigate the problem, develop some possible solutions, design/build an answer/prototype, and then test, modify and optimize. Different example challenges emphasize different aspects of this process, so the chapters are not repetitive. And the problems that are addressed really span a wide range of engineering endeavors.The organizing focus on different engineering fields is an important touch. "Engineering" encompasses a lot of different specialties and introducing young readers to all of the different fields is valuable, and might be a real eye opener for that young reader. So, we get aerospace, biomedical, chemical, mechanical, electrical, civil, geomatic, computer, and environmental engineering. Not bad at all.Whether you're looking for a STEM book or you just have a little budding LEGO maniac in the house this book could be a great interest and imagination grabber. A nice find. (Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Great for young children to find out how things work. Fabulous illustrations!

Engineered by Shannon Hunt is an excellent children’s non-fiction book — clear, informative, nicely illustrated, detailed, and logically structured, it would make an excellent addition to any child’s shelf.The book opens with a brief description of hundreds of people gathering in Times Square to watch the touchdown of Curiosity on Mars. In a single page, Hunt offers up the potential excitement of engineering via the cheering crowd, its can-do potential to solve mind-bogglingly difficult issues (“after an eight-month voyage through space”), its place in history (“the historic landing”), the amount of work required (“the technology that made it possible had originated years before”), and, via the rover’s name, the sense of curiosity that drives engineers —and children. It’s a great opening.From there Hunt steps back from the specific to a more generalized definition of who engineers are and what they do, then presents the steps in engineering design: Define, investigate, develop, create, test, optimize, share. Each of these steps is concisely but effectively defined. Once the foundation is set, Hunt moves delves into the details of several engineering fields, describing a specific real-world engineering problem and then explaining how the engineers solved it. The fields are: aerospace, biomedical, chemical, mechanical, electrical, civil, geomatic, computer, and environmental. Each problem gets a few pages, with several sidebars that offer up related information. A regular sidebar throughout is a brief bio of an engineer who worked on the particular project, along with a quote or two from the engineer. It’s a nice touch in that it offers up a bit of personal humanity amid all these large-scale projects. The projects themselves, which include a traffic jam, sewage pollution, and the loss of habitat for an endangered species, are sharply if briefly described and bring the abstract idea of “engineering” down to a more pragmatic, real world concept, showing how engineering solves issues that affect the lives of real people (or, in one case, real caribou).The language is clear and clean and does not speak down to its audience. Rather than rely on a dull, simplistic vocabulary Hunt employs lively and evocative verbs and nouns. Odors “waft” across a city, the dust of Mars “billows,” bike engineers are not “daunted” by a particularly stick issue. The language is a nice match for the excellent illustrations, which are similarly clean and clear, but offer up lovely little details. The illustrations as well as the text also present a diverse cast, beginning with the title page which shows a table surrounded by five people who are a nice mix of age, race, and gender.Engineered is a book I definitely would have picked up for my child once he got past second grade, and I highly recommend it as a gift or for any elementary school library.