Reviewed by Thomas Gole
7th Grade Science Teacher
Do you have students who excel in science? Do you have budding inventors in your classroom? The Amateur Scientist: The Complete 20th Century Collection is a CD-ROM resource that brings the best of Scientific American’s popular feature to these students. These articles will inspire, instruct, surprise, and even make them laugh. For those who love science, this will be some fun reading. For those new to science, this collection will encourage the joy of inventing and exploration.
The Amateur Scientist is a monthly column published in Scientific American. With this CD-ROM and Internet access, students can search by subject, by text, by area of science, by decade, or particular year within a decade. The articles are supported by references including an interactive periodic table of elements, physical constants, unit conversion factors, and a chemical property and safety database. Each article includes a project, complete with cost, difficulty, possible hazards, and current applications.
To illustrate the history of recent amateur science, the collection even includes some outdated articles. A second CD provides sources of freeware, demonstrations, and shareware that can assist scientific investigations, although I was disappointed to find that a few of these links were no longer functional. For long-time fans of the column, new readers, or teachers who are simply looking for a resource for budding investigators, this collection will be useful.
Review posted on 8/5/2001
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