Review by Horn Book Review
With Shah Selbe. Combining National Geographic Kids' signature packed magazine-like design with appealing material, this installment is an accessible, engagingly laid-out introduction to the evolving world of robotics. Over four chapters full of captioned photographs, readers discover real, potential, and fictional uses of robots and learn about international research and innovation. Contains a "robotics challenge" and an "interactive glossary." Reading list, websites. (c) Copyright 2017. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A cutting-edge gallery of working and experimental robots, with commentary from a working cybernetics expert and side looks at robots in movies and TV.Colorful and eye-catching as the photographs are, they're crowded together on the pages in an unsystematic jumble. There are true robotsdefined as machines that "think" (a term the author simplistically equates with "compute") and have at least one functional appendagealong with fictional ones, prosthetics, remote-controlled devices, mechanical toys, and purely speculative images. Readers may likewise come away with confused ideas from a commentary that slips Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" into an otherwise-factual overview, offers conflicting views about how well robots can dance or perform complex tasks, and includes uselessly brief descriptions of winning entries in a 2015 contest for young engineers. For a close-up look at robotics in practice, Selbe, described in the blurb as a "conservation technologist," adds a description of how he employs drones and other devices to study the Okavanga Delta in Botswana. The simultaneously publishing Everything Sports, by Eric Zweig with Shalise Manza Young, is similarly crowded.An overcompressed survey, slickly produced but too superficial to impart more than a glimpse of where the field stands or is going. (review quiz, index, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 8-11) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
