MAYBE YOU!

Poems and Plays For Science as Inquiry

Science is the work of lots of people in each generation trying to figure out how nature works and what we can do with it. This book is an invitation to you to enter that world and maybe even become one of those people for your generation. The ideas in this book are pretty simple, but they’re also extremely powerful, and once you get them in your head you’ll be thinking like a scientist.

This book is full of poems and plays about science for you and your friends to read to each other. You’re going to be amazed at just how much fun it can be to get crazy and go totally over-the-top when you act this stuff out. The best part is that you’ll be learning science at the same time, really learning it, as in acing tests and making your teachers and parents happy.

Now right there some of you heard a voice in your head that said something like, “Yeah, that may be true for really smart kids, but what about me?” Please let me tell you about that little voice—it’s not telling you the truth. It’s not exactly lying because it thinks it’s telling the truth, but what is says is still not truth. Human beings are smart, all human beings, and that includes you. If you’re smart enough to play the average video game you’re plenty smart enough to understand science. So please open that ferocious, great-white-shark brain of yours, and get ready to have a ton of fun hanging out with some great scientific thoughts.

My brain is like a great white shark
always hunting in the dark.
So shout it—CURIOSITY!
Yes that is how you measure me.
from My Curious Brain
(The Ultimate Scientific Instrument)

Young minds will shift into overdrive as they encounter the history, philosophy, and principles of scientific inquiry—all irresistibly packed in this poignant yet comical collection of dramatic poems, monologues, and short plays.

Calling on the time-honored principle that children remember “90% of what they do in dramatic presentation,” Maybe You! is the first book in the long-awaited Brod Bagert’s HeART of Science series, providing parents, teachers, and young learners with a comprehensive compendium of dramatic content literature, both entertaining and instructional.

In On the Field with the Pros, Tamara experiences the thrill of conducting her own research to debunk the myth of the Egyptian crocodile bird. In New Brain Magic Caroline and Javier explore the elements of critical thinking as they collaborate to concoct a magic potion “to turn normal brains into brilliant scientific wonders.” And in Real Monsters, a child discovers the revelatory power of scientific instruments when she observes dust mites and maggots, through a microscope, and concludes that real monsters do indeed exist, “but they’re very, very small.”

The essence of curiosity, the joy of critical thinking, the power of the scientific method, the tools of science, the relationship between technology and scientific discovery, publication and peer review, the progression of scientific knowledge with each generation “standing on the shoulders of giants,” it’s all here.

The collection concludes with Knowledge in Motion which describes the progression from Newton’s revolutionary Laws of Motion to Einstein’s even more revolutionary Theory of Special Relativity and drives to an empowering conclusion:

So you see how our knowledge keeps inching along.
It seems perfect today, but tomorrow it’s wrong.
And who will be next to propose something new?
First Newton…then Einstein…and next?…Maybe you!
from Knowledge in Motion