Top Science Books for Children: Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize 2024

Before we discuss the brilliant shortlisted science books for kids, can you talk a bit about why the Royal Society supports this prize, and what the judges were looking for?

I think the Royal Society supports it simply because it’s really important to get children interested in science early on if we’re going to have a new generation of good scientists coming through. There are now so many really great books that it’s good to highlight what’s out there. We were particularly focused on books that will not just tell kids about science, but inspire them to become scientists themselves. Or if they thought science was very inaccessible or boring, to inspire them to think differently about science.

Can you tell me briefly about your own work, and the background of the rest of the judging panel?

I’m a psychologist by training. I am now retired, but most of my research was focused on children with developmental difficulties in language. So I am very interested in how to motivate children, and how to talk to them at the right level so they feel they can engage with what you’re saying.

The panel had people with different professional interactions with children. There was a very experienced head teacher who had run some of the books past kids to see what they thought of them, and that was really valuable. We had two people who are actively engaged in science communication with children, and one of them is an author. We had quite a diverse scientific representation: a molecular biologist, someone in wildlife conservation and a research chemist. We were all very keen that the books have to be accurate scientifically.

So the judging panel ensures that the shortlisted books are all scientifically accurate, but then the winner is chosen by children. Did you have fun selecting this year’s Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize shortlist, or was it a fraught process?

It was fun but it was difficult, and that was mainly because the standard these days is so high. Different people were noticing different things and there were very few books where all of us agreed. In the end we had a vote, we treated it almost like the TV series The Traitors: we wrote down what we thought and then revealed our answers. It was quite tense between the last two. The books that made it onto the shortlist tended to be quite idiosyncratic. One of the things we liked about them was that you can’t neatly categorise them in traditional ways.

The first book we are discussing is All Bodies are Wonderful. Of the six books on the shortlist, this is the one for the youngest readers, say 6 to 8.

What we really liked about this book is the way it brings in so many different strands of science. You think this is just going to be a book about bodies, but actually it starts with stardust and talks about DNA and biology. It is very clear in terms of being very positive about diversity, which is of huge interest to me. When I did research I had to develop materials for children who had an extra sex chromosome, an extra X or Y. That doesn’t have a huge effect on you, but some of these children wanted to understand: Were they different? Why were they different?

This book is really the sort of thing that we were also trying to produce in terms of explaining that everybody’s got something about them that is not standard and that often is not a cause for worry. You should just accept that people are very, very diverse. All Bodies Are Wonderful also explains the reasons for that diversity, and it does talk about discrimination and tackles that issue head on. This book takes you through the science, and then the social implications of the science, in a way that I think a lot of children can relate to. They might very well feel empowered by this book.

Let’s move on to the next book on the shortlist, The Expanding World of Data, which is part of a series called Very Short Introductions for Curious Young Minds.

We felt this is a topic that is important to science, but is very seldom covered. It gets into the history of numbers. You can imagine having your mind blown by the idea that there was a time when zero hadn’t yet been defined or identified. The Expanding World of Data brings out engaging facts about numbers and makes kids think about numbers in that way, but also talks about the importance of data and what you can do with data and so on. It is a very impressive book for making a subject that’s typically thought of as rather dry, really very interesting.

There are many interesting sections, including using data badly, which is such an important topic. What age of reader would you say it’s for, 8 to 10?

We had it noted as 8 to 14, but maybe we stretched the upper limit a bit, in part because children are so variable. We’re trying to think what’s the reading level but also what’s the interest level, and I think that this book could still be interesting to children at 14.

The next shortlisted book is Can You Get Rainbows in Space? which is written by an astronomer.

This book is beautifully presented and cleverly done. It starts with the general aspects about colour and light, but then goes through different colours and brings out quirky facts about them. There’s a lot there to really engage children.

I really enjoyed this book. Now I know that hippos sweat red. I would recommend it for 8 to 10 year olds, do you agree?

We had it at 5-14. I think a five year old could enjoy some of this if you read it for them.

The next book on this year’s Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize shortlist is Where Are You Really From? written by a geneticist.

It’s a bit like the first book we talked about, but for kids around 8 to 11. It goes all the way through from the big bang and evolution and cosmology and bacteria and cells, to why people differ genetically. It covers a huge amount, and it does it in a light, amusing, chatty style.

Again, there is a strong message at the end about racism and anti-racism, which you feel comes from the heart because the author and illustrator themselves explain at the beginning that they’re not racially simple. Probably none of us are. With the mixtures of backgrounds that each of them has, they feel quite strongly that it is important that people understand that. It is worth emphasising that if you look at the genetics of people in Africa, they’re incredibly diverse. Facts like that are really clarifying that simple distinctions between black and white are just preposterous.

I was intrigued by this aspect of the book, that if you have — for example — Nigerian parents or grandparents, your DNA might have more in common with a person from China than one from Namibia, say.

That is such an important message. You’re not defined anyway by your genes, but I think we need to get this across in a strong way when kids are quite young. This book does that very powerfully. The illustrations are very nice, and there are cartoons and little jokes about this and that, so I think it could be very accessible to children and enjoyed by children.

Next up is Engineers Making a Difference, which is written by a mechanical engineer. It has a subtitle: Inventors, Technicians, Scientists and Tech Entrepreneurs Changing the World, and How You Can Join Them.

I love this, because it has the personal stories of all these different people doing such a range of extremely interesting things. It is attractively illustrated and you see the engineers who are very diverse, lots of women, lots of people of colour. I think it is really good to overcome the stereotype of the engineer, and to make it clear what a diverse range of things they do.

This book focuses not just on labels like aeronautical engineer or biomedical engineer, but on a particular project that you could work on as an engineer. I think a lot of these projects might make a child think “these are interesting things to spend your life doing and perhaps I might become an engineer”, which is very aligned with what the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize is trying to achieve. A wide range of topics is covered, and it’s appealingly laid out for kids.

I also like that this book has interviews with engineers talking about the problems they are trying to solve. And it has a timeline of engineering, and a useful introduction to the many different types of engineering. Would you agree it’s aimed at readers age 10-14?

We had it at 12-14 but something along those lines, yes. I think this book should be in every school library.

We have come to the final science book on the shortlist, Mission Arctic, which is also for older kids, around 10-14. I included this book on our list of the best new books for kids last year when it came out.

This book neatly weaves science into a narrative. Again, you’re not just telling people about the scientific facts that they need to know, but making it personal. You get a sense of different people in a scientific team doing different things and that this can be quite a fun job and important, with all our concerns currently about climate. So this book ticks a lot of boxes, and in an engaging style.

I like that it’s not just about the science of climate change, it’s for any reader who is interested in the idea of a massive polar expedition and how it compares with early Arctic exploration, by an author who was on the expedition.

Yes, so they get some history in there as well and it makes it exciting, thinking about going on an expedition. There were no books like this when I was young, where you are teaching people science but it’s part of the story. It’s a brilliant thing, when you get authors who can do that.

Do you want to add anything about the books or about communicating science to children?

I think all of these books are good for drawing children in, to dip in and find things visually attractive and not be overwhelmed by a lot of scientific jargon. We very much felt we should go for books that are not just putting information into children’s brains, but making them perhaps think a little bit differently about science, and I think all of these authors quite cleverly did that. It is going to be absolutely intriguing to see what the children make of these books and which one they will pick as the winner.