Hello From 2030

SUMMARY: Examines possibilities for earth's future in the year 2030. Specifically focuses on scientific advancements including artificial intelligence, environmental concerns, and human lifestyle.

REVIEW: This book reminds me of a ride at Epcot Center in Disneyworld Orlando. The ride, inside the iconic Spaceship Earth (the giant "golf ball" structure), takes riders on a 15-minute tour of the history of human technological advancements. Traveling from cavemen huddled around a fire through Walt Disney's imagined city of the future, Spaceship Earth is a ride that every Disney enthusiast needs to visit at least once.

Hello from 2030 looks at possible future inventions that will help make our future lives easier, cleaner, and healthier. The book pays special attention to environmental concerns such as food and water shortages, global warming, disease, and deforestation. I like how Schutten addresses these issues honestly but without being overly gloom-and-doom. The "scarier" issues of the uncertain future focus more on causes and prevention than on a "sky is falling" mentality. Rather than scaring younger readers, I think this look at the future will motivate them to become more energy-conscious and aware of their own roles in conservation.

USES FOR TEACHERS/LIBRARIANS:

ART/ARCHITECTURE: Design a room or home of the future. Lots of math applications for this as well.

SCIENCE: Conservation efforts. What can you do to help conserve water, curb pollution, grow new food, etc.?

ENGLISH: Write a letter from yourself in 2030. What is the world like? What do you do all day? Do you have a family? What are the problems and possible solutions?

THE BOTTOM LINE: An interesting look at technological and environmental possibilities in the year 2030.

STATUS IN MY LIBRARY: On order.

READALIKES: Robotics: Discover the Science and Technology of the Future (Ceceri)

Presentation: 5/5--colorful and varied, lots of white space

Quality of information: 5/5--Not alarmist; no obvious agenda beyond conveying information about the future

Photos/illustrations: 5/5--colorful photos and/or drawings on nearly every page; pages are clean and white, but many pages have colorful background art (does not impede or distract from text)

Documentation of sources: 5/5--Author thanks six college professors for their input but does not specify their fields of expertise or give any information besides their names. Extremely thorough "Notes" section at end gives references and links of interest--it is 35-pages in length and broken down by chapter. Index section is planned but not available at the time of my review.

Front and back matter: 5/5--Includes TOC, 35-pages of Notes, Acknowledgements, Index (not viewed)

Engrossing: 4/5--Very easy to read and understand. I wasn't always riveted, but it was interesting enough for me to complete in one sitting.

Writing: 5/5--Love the conversational tone, which will draw readers in.
Appeal to teens: 5/5--Who isn't interested in the not-so-distant future?
Appropriate length: 5/5--Interesting enough for me to read in one sitting. Though it has 224 pages, lots of colorful illustrations and ample use of white space break up the text nicely.
CONTENT:

Language: none Sexuality: none Violence: none Drugs/Alcohol: none Other: none

Hello from 2030 refers to Watson the Computer's "Jeopardy" competition against two humans. Here is the 19-minute video of that competition. Very cool!

A great and wide-reaching little book filled with predictions about our future society, and the technology of today that's propelling us into that future. Geared for school-age children, with little notes from future selves, it brings up the hot topics that will change society for better or worse. In some ways this book is far more relevant today,than it will be for predicting the future, and it's approach is guaranteed to get inquisitive readers searching for more.

Great illustrations, lots of good content presented in a variety of ways, should be a popular title along with other materials like world record books and weird but true.

This is definitely a great book to purchase on many counts. It has topics of interest to students, like houses, food, and technology, combined with an aesthetically pleasing layout, complete with requisite cartoon robots. Why don't I have the Jetson's Rosie doing my laundry? Actually, the chapter on robots was interesting in the way the past vision of robots was addresses-- the machines that do things like laundry and cooking have become so efficient that robots would be superfluous! Who knew that microwaves were not a fabulous technology. My grandmother, who was born in 1893, would have begged to differ. She never locked the doors to her house until we bought her a microwave in 1980! Lots of good notes and statistics, as well as beautiful pictures, make this a good jumping off point for discussions about lots of different issues.

I am looking forward to seeing the physical book, though-- even though E Books are the thing of the future, sometimes the pages (at least on e ARCS) take longer to load than I would like, and make it hard to flip back and forth between sections for cross referencing.

This will appear on my blog on 10/6/14