Why I Picked City of Ember to Teach Science (and What Made People of Sparks the Obvious Next Step)
I read a lot of middle-grade novels looking for the right science hook, and most of them just don't have one. They're good stories, but the science is either missing entirely or stapled on at the end. City of Ember is different. It doesn't just contain science. It's structurally about the loss of it.
The premise: an underground city, built by unnamed "Builders" generations ago, is starting to fail. The lights flicker. The food stores run low. And the people living there don't actually know how any of it works. They just know the procedures. There's a scene early in the book where a boy finally gets access to the room housing the city's power generator, and he realizes the old man who's kept it running for decades doesn't understand it either. He just knows which parts to hit when it breaks.
That's not a minor detail, that's the whole book, over and over: a society that inherited technology without inheriting the science behind it. Which is, honestly, an increasingly relevant thing to hand a kid who's growing up surrounded by devices nobody around them can really explain either.
Once I noticed that pattern, the rest of the book turned into a real science curriculum practically by accident. There's a hydroelectric generator to explain. A mysterious crop disease with no stated cause, a perfect setup for teaching kids how disease actually spreads. A girl piecing together a torn, damaged document using nothing but context and pattern recognition, real cryptographic reasoning, whether the book calls it that or not. A pair of kids who've never seen a match or a candle in their lives, discovering fire the same way humans first did. A boat trip that's a genuine physics lesson in buoyancy, if anyone bothers to point it out.
Nobody in the story explains any of this. That's exactly the point. It leaves the door wide open for me to.
People of Sparks picks up right where Ember leaves off, and it was an easy call to keep going. The kids who spent an entire book living off the last of a two-century food stockpile suddenly land in a small farming community that has to grow everything it eats, year after year, with no backup plan. It's the natural next question after Ember's food storage crisis: what does it actually take to keep a population fed indefinitely, not just survive off what's already stored away.
Between the two books, my students get a real arc: a society that forgot the science behind its own survival, followed by one that has to relearn how to actually sustain itself. That's a better science curriculum than any textbook I could have handed them, and neither book was trying to teach science at all. They were just telling a good story. The science was already sitting there, waiting for someone to point it out.
Check out my current science classes here.