Last night I was thinking about this topic and I had completely forgotten I had a set of Growing Up with Science books when I was in 6th grade or so. It was a 26-volume set (the 26th volume was a glossary). You could buy them once per month but my parents got the whole things at once after 5-6 months of me griping about how long it’d take to complete the set. At some point they must’ve assumed I finished reading them 'cause they were given away without my knowledge. I wasn’t very pleased. It may be why I forgot about them.
Yeah it’s clear they have the same lineage. The subtitle on the set I had was The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Invention. I think the set you have was probably geared toward an older audience.
I don’t know what the book was called or where it came from but it was essentially maps of each continent after each major border changing upheaval (according to white Europeans, of course). I pored over them and went through a phase of wanting to be a history teacher, which I got over in high school, when I discovered how wrong much of what I already learned was.
I am sore tempted to curse and discurse about my assembler learning stories with the CDC 6400 – but this carries us even further off-topic for this thread. Someday we must do lunch.
After we stopped teaching that I taught Cyber assembler, but just for one term so I don’t remember it at all. But Thornton’s book on the CDC6600 is probably the thing that got me interested in computer architecture.
I remember being thrilled in kindergarten when the teacher introduced me to the dictionary. I read it a lot, though the part I found most fascinating was the pronunciation. I remember almost getting in trouble once for insisting “quay” could be pronounced like “key” and having to show it to my teacher in the dictionary.
I later got a set of Encyclopedias at home. I didn’t read everything in them, but I would go through them and find stuff I considered interesting. My grandparent had encyclopedias and Childcraft (I think the name was), which I’d read. But I didn’t get too far in the Encyclopedia Britanica, as it was rather old, with tiny print, few images to illustrate anything, and just huge books that were hard to carry. It just seemed more wordy and less interesting. I expected at the time that I’d grow into them–that they were more adults encyclopedias, for serious research instead of just browsing like the worldbooks.
I did get the encyclopedia programs when I got older, but I never really got into them as much. It was too fascinated with websites and such. It felt weird reading static information after that point.
There was another ad with the annoying kid showing a computer (Apple II), a video camera, digital music (on compact disks); and the kid claiming that all that stuff would not help him with his school work.
Interesting to notice that all that is inside the current cheapest smartphones.
Even the Encyclopedia Britannica if the phone has internet access.
Not only did we have World Book encyclopedia, the World Book Year Book and the World Book Science Year, he also had lots of nifty pages from World Book and the supplements that were available as handouts. So I had ones of science experiments and How a Bill Becomes Law (I was pre-Schoolhouse Rock. To me How a Bill Becomes Law wasn’t a musical number – it was a color-coded series of pages from the encyclopedia
We also had the Cyclo-Teacher system of Programmed Instruction