Scientists are people who discover or invent things that make life easier for the rest of the world. It can be something as invisible as gravity, a cure for a once-incurable disease, or the study of stars. The book My First Heroes — Scientists pays tribute to four selfless individuals who went out of their way so that others’ futures could be less problematic than their own.

In this book for preschool children, you get to meet folks like Chinese astronomer Zhang Heng, English mathematician Isaac Newton, Polish physicist Marie Curie and English chemist Rosalind Franklin. Without these four individuals, we wouldn’t be living in a world where we knew what stars mean, what pulls everything back to Earth, how to reduce the effects of the deadly disease cancer, and what makes your body work.

Although the book dedicates one spread (two pages) to each individual, it comes up with a novel way to make you understand their inspiring lives and incredible discoveries. Illustrated by Nila Aye in consultation with Barbara Taylor, it tells you that it was Zhang Heng who built a machine to make maps of the stars and made a list of over 2,5000 bright stars in the night sky. It also explains that had an apple not fallen on his head, Isaac Newton might not have discovered gravity.

What makes this novelty board book different than normal books is that it features a different feature for each scientist. On the page dedicated to Zhang Heng, there is a rotating feature that makes you move the stars and the sky as the illustration of the Chinese astronomer points upwards.

And then there is Marie Curie working in a laboratory where the push-up feature makes the readers understand how she would have succeeded in her work, followed by Rosalind Franklin on whose page we can witness what she saw while working on DNA which are the instructions that tell your body how to work.

Through this book, young readers like yourself can discover how scientists changed our world and what made them go for things that others weren’t attempting back in the day. Everything from the text to the pictures are presented keeping in mind that it might motivate little scientists and, who knows, unlock their love for science at an early age.

Published in Dawn, Young World, July 22th, 2023