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    • Mission and Goals
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  • Improve Practice
    • K-12 Effective Practices
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from the field

2/20/2023

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Best STEM Books for 2022
In fall 2022, representatives from the National Science Teaching Association’s Children’s Book Council and from other disciplinary groups met for the sixth time to select exemplary children’s literature in STEM.

Since 2014 this joint committee has sought out literature that represents the best of STEM through:
  • Modeling real-world innovation
  • Embracing real-world design, invention, and innovation
  • Connecting with authentic experiences
  • Showing assimilation of new ideas
  • Illustrating teamwork, diverse skills, creativity, and cooperation
  • Inviting divergent thinking and doing
  • Integrating interdisciplinary and creative approaches
  • Exploring multiple solutions to problems
  • Addressing connections between STEM disciplines
  • Exploring Engineering Habits of Mind
    • Systems thinking
    • Creativity
    • Optimization
    • Collaboration

It’s important to note that the criteria above do not require science content—even if it is integrated across disciplines. The best STEM books might represent the practices of science and engineering by:
  • Asking questions, solving problems, designing, and redesigning
  • Integrating STEM disciplines
  • Showing the progressive changes that characterize invention and/or engineering
  • Demonstrating designing or redesigning, improving, building, or repairing a product or idea
  • Showing the process of working through trial and error
  • Progressively developing better engineering solutions
  • Analyzing efforts and making necessary modifications along the way
  • Illustrating that failure might happen and is acceptable — provided reflection and learning occur, including:
    • Communication
    • Ethical consideration

Some of these books might not cover STEM content at all. They might simply define STEM habits of mind. For example, a biography might be STEM if it shows creative thought, progressive improvement, and even struggle and failure. But just telling a sequential story of achievement in a biography would not make it a STEM book. A winner would have to provoke a sense of innovation in the reader in any genre.

All the winners are interdisciplinary in some way: Content, process, and field of endeavor. The list below attempts to classify them, but, of course, the greatest STEM achievements defy classification.


Biographies
Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer
Traci Sorell
Building Zaha: The Story of Architect Zaha Hadid
Victoria Tentler-Krylov
A Life Electric: The Story of Nikola Tesla
Azadeh Westergaard
Benoit Mandelbrot: Reshaping the World
Robert Black
Secrets of the Sea: The Story of Jeanne Power, Revolutionary Marine Scientist

Evan Griffith
Thank You, Dr. Salk!: The Scientist Who Beat Polio and Healed the World
Dean Robbins
The Stuff Between the Stars: How Vera Rubin Discovered Most of the Universe
Sandra Nickel
Wonder Women of Science: Twelve Geniuses Who Are Currently Rocking Science, Technology, and the World
Tiera Fletcher and Ginger Rue

Inventions
Awards also were given to books about inventions and the process that multiple inventors went through.
Bicycle: Eureka! The Biography of an Idea
Lori Haskins Houran
Light Bulb: Eureka! The Biography of an Idea
Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld
A Shot in the Arm: Big Ideas that Changed the World #3
Don Brown
From Here to There: Inventions That Changed the Way the World Moves
Vivian Kirkfield
Glasses: Eureka! The Biography of an Idea
Lori Haskins Houran

Engineering
Engineering is prominent in the list, with familiar projects conducted in innovative ways.
Uma Wimple Charts Her House
Reif Larsen      
Maxine Greatest Garden Ever
Ruth Spiro
Someone Builds the Dream
Lisa Wheeler
Mimic Makers: Biomimicry Inventors Inspired by Nature
Kristen Nordstrom

Mathematics
And mathematics is not a tool but a science in itself.
Look, Grandma! Ni, Elisi!
Art Coulson
Molly and the Mathematical Mysteries: Ten Interactive Adventures in Mathematical Wonderland
Eugenia Cheng
Luna's Yum Yum Dim Sum
Natasha Yim

Computer Science
Coding becomes science, too. 
Artificial Intelligence
Dinah Williams
  
Coding as STEM
Coding is both language and science in more award-winning books.
What Is Nintendo?
Gina Shaw
Code Breaker, Spy Hunter: How Elizebeth Friedman Changed the Course of Two World Wars
Laurie Wallmark

The World Around
Societal and environmental problems become the theme for more award-winning books.
Amara and the Bats
Emma Reynolds
A Shot in the Arm: Big Ideas that Changed the World #3
Don Brown
Scene of The Crime: Tracking Down Criminals with Forensic Science
Hp Newquist
Bones Unearthed (Creepy and True #3)
Kerrie Logan Hollihan
Cougar Crossing: How Hollywood's Celebrity Cougar Helped Build a Bridge for City Wildlife
Meeg Pincus
Upstream, Downstream: Exploring Watershed Connections

Rowena Rae
Lady Bird Johnson, That's Who!: The Story of a Cleaner and Greener America

Tracy Nelson Maurer
Race to the Bottom of the Earth: Surviving Antarctica
Rebecca E. F. Barone
The Great Stink: How Joseph Bazalgette Solved London’s Poop Pollution Problem
Colleen Paeff
Scene of The Crime: Tracking Down Criminals with Forensic Science
Hp Newquist

Selling STEM
Invention extends to entrepreneurship.
Eat Bugs! #1: Project Startup​ Heather Alexander

Innovative books lead to innovative, integrated curricula. For more information on each award-winning book, go to Best STEM Books K–12 2022 | NSTA

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