Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions You Can Build Yourself [Paperback]

 

 

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I acquired this book for my nine-year old daughter's home school lessons, as this year we were studying both the Renaissance and the history of inventions.

After reading Diane Stanley's wonderful illustrated biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, my daughter became fascinated by the man, and so she very much enjoyed reading through this particular book. Although the cover would lead you to believe the book would be filled with instructions for science projects, in fact the bulk of the book is biographical information about Leonardo himself. Each "invention" is preceded by several pages of information on how Leonardo developed said invention, what he was doing in his life at that time, how the Renaissance environment played a role in his work, and so on. It's all very interesting.

As for the inventions. There is a wide variety of projects here. The book is divided into several sections: Leonardo the Artist and dreamer includes (for example) instructions for making your own tempera paint, and drawing in perspective; Leonardo's Useful Machines includes, among others, instructions for building a camera obscura; Leonardo and Water shows us how to make a very ambitious project, Walk-on-Water-Shoes; Leonardo in Flight includes instructions on building a helicopter and a parachute; and Leonardo's War Inventions shows us how to build a safety bridge, a trebuchet, and a tank.

It is a very nice variety of projects. Some are easy to do at home, and would be interesting for younger children, but some would be better for older children. A few, such as the trebuchet, are quite involved and complex and would be a good choice for an older child (say, grade 7 or 8) to use for a project for a science fair.

Although overall I was impressed with this book, I must point out that the instructions sometimes left something to be desired. It seems to me that the publisher wanted to reduce the length of the book, or perhaps make the instructions "easier" by making them shorter, but what I found was that some of the instructions seemed incomplete. More detail would have been helpful. As well, I found a couple of actual errors. For example, when we made the Camera Obscura, the instructions were not only incomplete (the author mentioned using the plastic lid from a tennis ball tube, but neglected to say that it had to be opaque or covered with tissue paper--ours was clear), but there was an actual error: The diagram said to look in the open end of the tube, while the instructions said to look in the pinhole end! Needless to say we were pretty confused, and could not finish the project until we looked it up on the Internet.

So I can't give this book 5 stars when the instructions were sometimes confusing and lacked detail. But I still think it's a very worthwhile book for anyone interested in Leonardo or anyone looking for some unusual science projects.

One more thing--the back of the book says the projects use common household supplies--this is not always true. Some of the projects will require purchasing things like doweling, wood pieces, or foam insulation.

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