Gift Guide: Kids & The Eternal Kid

From thinking to tinkering, by way of color, music and photography.

This is Part 2 of the three-part Brain Pickings holiday gift guide. Today, we’re looking at goods and goodies for kids of all ages and the eternal kid in everyone.

HERE COMES SCIENCE

Indie rock icons They Might Be Giants are among the most revolutionary musicians of our time. Their critically acclaimed Here Comes Science children’s series lives up to their relentless thinking-in-all-kinds-of-directions innovation and consistent excellence. The 2-disc CD/DVD album is a bundle of creativity and entertainment, tied with a ribbon of education. Although aimed at the K-5 set, the playful lyrics and brilliantly animated videos are an absolute treat for musicologists and design junkies alike — we can attest.

We reviewed it in full, with trailers and more, here.

Perfect for: Musicologists, science lovers, those into creative and non-traditional education

FUJIFILM INSTAX MINI

Polaroid may have barely escaped the kiss of obsolescence, but instant film cameras will always hold immeasurable nostalgic charm in the digital age. The new Fujifilm Instax MINI offers a lovely twist on your dad’s old Land Cam, packaged in a gorgeously designed Mac-ish white body that’s just a joy to hold and look at. It prints credit-card-sized photos and, for those interested in the technical shenanigans, has a built-in flash, four exposure settings for indoor and outdoor shooting, and — our favorite — a wicked wide-angle lens that makes for some gorgeous, gorgeous shots. It’s a return to simpler times of no memory cards and USB cables and i-anything. But it gives you more creative control while still being a no-brainer to operate.

Sure, we love (love love) the design, but we’re even more taken with what it stands for — an analog connection to the fleeting moment, celebrating the essence of the presence in a way that preserves it for the future.

Perfect for: Budding photographers, creatively inclined kids, design aficionados, hopeless nostalgics, retro lovers

ABC3D

Who doesn’t love a good pop-up book? Marion Bataille‘s ABC3D takes the familiar genre it to a whole new level.

Slick, stylish and designerly, it’s hard to capture its tactile, interactive magic in static words — you have to have it in your hands to truly appreciate it.

We took a closer look, along with 4 more creative alphabet books, last week.

Perfect for: Designers and their kids, bookbinding geeks, paper craft lovers

PART OF IT

It’s never too early — or too late — to introduce the idea of the conscious consumer. And when it’s done with quirk and creativity, it’s bound to engage, inspire and, well, effect change. Enter Part Of It, a wonderful venture founded by illustrator duo Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Burns in 2007, working with artists to create products for causes they are passionate about.

From Helvetica alphabet t-shirts to a lovely tote bags, profits from these goodies benefit charities chosen by the artists. (Who, by the way, include Brain Pickings darling Adrian Johnson.)

Perfect for: The socially-conscious and design-driven

THE INDIE ROCK COLORING BOOK

Indie music defines itself through the colorful quirk of its artists and evangelists. Without that, it would blend in with the grey mediocrity of the mainstream. For the past two years, obscenely talented UK illustrator Andy J. Miller has been working on a project that celebrates this whimsy. Today, he finally releases the Indie Rock Coloring Book — a wonderful collection of hand-illustrated activity pages, mazes, connect-the-dots, and coloring pages for indie icons like Bloc Party, The Shins, Iron & Wine, Broken Social Scene, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, The New Pornographers, The National, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

We reviewed it in full, with trailers and more, here.

Perfect for: Indie music fans and their artistically inclined offspring

THE ELEMENTS

Photographer and all-around geek Theodor Gray spent 7 years gathering objects, from the fascinating to the mundane, that embody and exemplify the 118 elements in the periodic table. Then he shot them brilliantly, producing The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe — an utterly captivating exploration of the matter that we, and all the things around us, are made of.

Set to the first authorized video version of Tom Lehrer’s iconic eponymous song, The Elements video gives you a taste for what to expect from this gem of a book.

Perfect for: Neo-geeks, science junkies, photography lovers, visual learners

MAGNA TILES

We’re firm believers in the power of tinkering in developing creativity.

And there’s nothing more stimulating to the creative brain than playing with simple, flat shapes and basic colors to produce a near-infinite variety of 3D whimsy. Which is why we love this 100-piece set of clear-color magna tiles. Sure, kids will be all over it, but we dare you not to love it yourself.

Perfect for: Tinkerers, builders, color lovers, budding industrial designers

POOH’S COMEBACK

In 1926, English author Alan Alexander Milne took a shelf of his son’s stuffed toys and turned them into some of the best-loved books ever published — the Winnie-the-Pooh series was born. This year, 81 years after Christoper Robin and the gang left the Hundred Acre Wood, they are back for a new adventure.

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is among the most epic comebacks in English literature. Although Milne himself is long dead, the new book is written by David Benedictus — who also produced the audio adaptations of Winnie-the-Pooh, starring Dame Judi Dench — and meticulously based on Milne’s Pooh stories, with artwork by Mark Burgess in the style of original illustrator E. H. Shepard.

We reviewed it in full here.

Perfect for: Readers, nostalgics, Pooh lovers of all ages

LEGO ARCHITECTURE

We love LEGO — who doesn’t? And what better way to learn about the man-made hallmarks of our civilization than by building them with your bare hands?

No, you won’t be lugging mastabas across the Egyptian desert — we’re talking about the LEGO Architecture Series. From the Taj Mahal to Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces, you — or your little one — can get down and dirty with humanity’s greatest architectural achievements.

Perfect for: Tinkerers, builders, architecture lovers

CRAYOLA EXECUTIVE PEN

Ah, Crayola. Easily one of the most beloved brands of all time. Even just saying the name evokes that distinct, wonderful smell of your first crayon.

Now, you can resurrect your inner kid with a lovely, desk-job-safe Crayola Executive Pen, in orange, green, violet and yellow. Need we say more?

Perfect for: Everyone!

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Alphabet Books Rethought

Contortionists, negative space, and what Claymation has to do with the Kama Sutra.

We love books. And we love nontraditional takes on the traditional. Recently, we’ve looked at hypertextual books, ambitious carved-out reproductions of history books and Pictorial Webster’s. Today, we look at three inspired examples of innovation on the most rudimentary gateway to language and literature: The alphabet book.

THE HUMAN ALPHABET

In 2006, we had the pleasure of meeting the phenomenal Pilobolus dance company, an incredible group of choreographers and dancer-athletes who produce some of the best original work in modern dance today. So imagine our delight when we discovered photographer John Kane‘s The Human Alphabet — an ambitious and striking alphabet book, using the bodies of Pilobolus dancers to construct each of the letters through ingenious grips, bends and twists of the human form.

With its superb photography, vibrant colors and jaw-dropping acrobatic contortionism, The Human Alphabet is bound to astonish. If language had a Kama Sutra, this would be it.

THE HIDDEN ALPHABET

Curiosity is the fundamental fuel of learning. Mix that with children’s boundless imagination, and you’ve got a powerful recipe for inspiration-education. That’s exactly what illustrator Laura Vaccaro Seeger does in The Hidden Alphabet — a visual gem of a book, where a black mat frames an object on each page, then peels away to reveal its starting letter.

Risking to live up to a designer cliche, we do love our negative space. And The Hidden Alphabet plays with it brilliantly — when the black mat is lifted, each object becomes a significant building block of the letter’s negative space, with a clever perspective shift from foreground to background that plays on the popular figure-ground optical illusions.

Besides the innovative visual format reinterpreting the traditional approach of matching each letter with a word, Seeger’s choice of the words themselves — “inkblot,” “partridge,” “quotation mark,” “yolk” — is equally refreshing and adds a whole new layer of sophistication to the artwork.

ABC3D

We’re suckers for a good pop-up book, but Marion Bataille‘s ABC3D takes it to a whole new level.

Slick, stylish and designerly, it’s hard to capture its tactile, interactive magic in static words — you have to have it in your hands to truly appreciate it.

The Washington Post hit the nail on the head:

Does for paper what Claymation did for mud. It’s a three-dimensional, interactive, cinematic treat for the littlest fingers right up to the oldest eye […]

A perfectly architectured A sets the pace from the very first page.

A neat pop-up with the i and j sharing the same dot.

As the spread is opened, the two vortices in the S rotate.

And just when you think ABC3D couldn’t possibly delight and surprise more, it does: We’ve seen a trailer for an album, a trailer for a typeface, but a trailer for a book?

Bonus points for the track (which reminds us of Squirrel Nut Zippers, our favorite quirk-swing band) — and even more bonus points for offering it as a free download on the book’s equally well-designed website.

From the lenticular cover, which changes by the angle at which you hold it, to the metamorphic X, which becomes a Y as you flick your hand, ABC3D is an absolute treat for kids, industrial design junkies and the typeface geeks alike.

BONUS

UPDATE: We’ve just been alerted (Thanks, Coudal!) to an absolute gem we had no choice but to include here.

Remember The Indie Rock Coloring Book? Now, from the wonderful Paste Magazine, comes An Indie Rock Alphabet Book — an equally wonderful delight for hipster parents and their hipster-to-be kids.

From Animal Collective to The Zombies, by way of Joy Division, Tom Waits and ?uestlove, the book is written by Paste editors Kate Kiefer and Rachael Maddux, and brilliantly illustrated by so-indie-he’s-off-the-Google-radar artist owen the owen.

An Indie Rock Alphabet Book is a get-’em-while-they’re-young necessary tool for engineering tomorrow’s musicologists. After all, the first step to that Rolling Stone internship application is spelling your name correctly. And, really, who wants to learn with “cat” when you can have “Cat Power”?

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Super-Smart Learning

Why playing Oregon Trail is like learning basic Japanese, or how to beat the Ebbinghaus Curve.

For a scientifically inclined utopian, technology is the potential antidote to all of society’s ills. Techno-optimists believe every challenge, from cancer to cleanliness, has an applied-science solution. Most of us approach technology with significantly more skepticism, of course. But as 21st-century citizens, we’ve come to understand that our progressively more complex problems require more than machines alone.

As it turns out, though, simpler challenges—like, say, memorizing the names of world capitals—are in fact being better addressed by new technologies every day. So goes the story behind two learning programs, Smart.fm and SuperMemo, both garnering attention as we increasingly look to gadgets and gizmos to improve our lifestyles. (Call it the Wii Fit phenomenon.)

Smart.fm and SuperMemo aim, and claim, to help you memorize and retain knowledge in more efficient ways. Both products are based on a well-proven finding known as the Ebbinghaus, or forgetting, curve, first deduced by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. The curve is an equation (, to be specific) that describes how our brains forget things over time.

Essentially, Ebbinghaus found that memory retention of newly acquired knowledge declines unless we consciously review that knowledge. Subsequent scientific studies (mostly in the 1930s and late 1960s) revealed even more about the nature of memory and learning: If we review an item right before we’re about to forget it, immediately prior to our brains’ contact with the curve, we actually improve our ability to retain that item in memory. The way to ensure remembrance, then, is to increase the length of time between these information reviews, a technique otherwise known as spaced repetition.

When computers became more common in the 1980s, researchers began to experiment with algorithms for automating the spacing of repeated knowledge over time.

Fast forward to the future and the tantalizing promises of technology for better living. Just as exercise has its own digital assistant, so too can learning. If all it takes to remember something is a well-timed reminder, then why not leave your learning to a robot? And now not only can we automate such simple processes, we can make them fit in the palm of a hand. Smart.fm‘s newly released iPhone app promises to do just that — make learning a portable experience — as illustrated in a cheeky short its creators made to highlight the app’s features and functionality.

The iPhone app is based on Smart.fm‘s online-learning platform, which itself grew out of an adaptive-learning system called iKnow. Cerego, a Japanese venture-backed think tank, created all of the products and had already popularized iKnow’s use in Japan before introducing an English-language version. We were fascinated to see how this earlier incarnation of Smart.fm developed into its intuitive, present-day user experience, a process satisfyingly documented as a case study by the über-smart design firm Adaptive Path, which partnered with Cerego on these multiple orders of translation.

Where Smart.fm is sexy and supple in design, SuperMemo is, well, not. (Consider it the Craig’s List of online learning.) What it does have, however, is a storied pedigree documented by Wired and other ahead-of-the-curve pubs (pun unfortunately intended). SuperMemo‘s creator, Piotr Wozniak, is its ultimate evangelist because he’s also its Ur-user — he created the platform for his personal use. Wozniak developed the software behind SuperMemo in the mid-1980s without prior knowledge of Ebbinghaus’s repetitive trials. Its user interface seems like it’s changed little since Wozniak wrote his first programs, but perhaps this is SuperMemo‘s charm. In fact, a kind of cottage industry of both white-label versions and ad-hoc, pirated programs sprang up as soon as the Internet allowed for easy file sharing.

What Smart.fm hides under the hood, however, SuperMemo makes accessible. All of the statistical breakdowns driving the program’s prompts are available for your perusal, should you get excited by indices and intervals. (No need to be shy–we’re very sympathetic to such symptoms here at Brain Pickings.) For the person who wants to see and directly manipulate a product’s inner workings, SuperMemo allows for much more hands-on interaction than the plug-and-play approach designed by Adaptive Path. What both Smart.fm and SuperMemo share is a pliability in their ultimate purposes. You can use preprogrammed language-learning modules, but you can also personalize each by adding your own information for spaced repetition.

So while neither Smart.fm nor SuperMemo can cure the common cold, consider exploring technologically augmented learning for your next mental exercise–like that taxonomy of Tolkein characters you’ve been meaning to commit to memory.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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Data Posters: FlowingPrints

Yellow buses, Scantron sheets and why teachers prefer California.

We love data visualization. And FlowingData is among the smartest, most compelling curators of the discipline. Today, they launch the long-awaited FlowingPrints poster series — gorgeous original prints, in sets based around specific data themes.

The inaugural set features three prints about education. Enrollment and Dropouts reveals historical patterns of attendance, illuminating both the progress made so far and the need for further improvement. College High exposes the staggering disconnect between average income and yearly cost of higher education. How America Learns: By The Numbers was inspired by the nostalgic tangram puzzles of childhood, divulging the complexity of all that goes into learning.

The series is both beautiful and revelational, offering a conceptually and aesthetically sophisticated way to explore fascinating data stories.

Besides, let’s face it, no matter how inspired and creative a piece of data visualization may be, the sheer size of the computer screen often sells it short. (GOOD Transparencies, we’re looking at you.)

And now for a special Brain Pickings treat: Get $20 off when you order the set here and use the discount code CQ4W9GWH.

Enjoy — we certainly are.

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