9 October 2017
The Royal Society Young People's Book Prize “aims to inspire young people to read about science and promotes the writing of excellent, accessible books for under-14s”. A shortlist of six fab science books is chosen by a group of Royal Society members, then the judging is turned over to panels of school pupils all over the country. This is the first year that we have taken part.
Our panel comprised twelve boys, now in Years 6-8, who met during the summer term and the first half of this term to review the six shortlisted books. The boys took turns to take the books home and swapped their views over several lunchtime meetings before submitting their own final verdicts. One book stood out for most of our boys – Robert Winston's Home Lab: Exciting Experiments for Budding Scientists – and all were in agreement that it should be our winner. It will be interesting to see which book wins overall in November once the results are in.