Join the LEGO CITY minifigures at the bustling LEGO airport in this awesome activity book. Build your very own LEGO CITY minifigure, read the stories and complete the puzzles. Lots of fun for every LEGO fan!

With simple, step-by-step directions and a visually rich design, this unique series of instruction books for LEGO® creations helps young children learn and have fun simultaneously. The Build It! series of visually rich instruction books for LEGO® models is perfect for children ages 5 and up. Inside Volume 1 you'll find a range of creative models to put together--from animals to airplanes, street scenes to seascapes and much more, created using the LEGO® Classic set 10693, or bricks you already have at home. Each book in this interactive series contains 3-5 projects featuring a diverse range of models. Full color diagrams guide you through the process, enhancing the fun. Build hours of family fun with the Build It! instruction book series.

It's a busy day in Lego City! Young LEGO fans can create their own city adventures in this play-along sticker storybook. Full color. Consumable.

"In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” So begins this story of personal redemption through the unlikely medium of electronic games. Quake, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and other online games not only offered author Jim Rossignol an excellent escape from the tedium of office life. They also provided him with a diverse global community and a job—as a games journalist. Part personal history, part travel narrative, part philosophical reflection on the meaning of play, This Gaming Life describes Rossignol’s encounters in three cities: London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. From his days as a Quake genius in London’s increasingly corporate gaming culture; to Korea, where gaming is a high-stakes televised national sport; to Iceland, the home of his ultimate obsession, the idiosyncratic and beguiling Eve Online, Rossignol introduces us to a vivid and largely undocumented world of gaming lives. Torn between unabashed optimism about the future of games and lingering doubts about whether they are just a waste of time, This Gaming Life also raises important questions about this new and vital cultural form. Should we celebrate the “serious” educational, social, and cultural value of games, as academics and journalists are beginning to do? Or do these high-minded justifications simply perpetuate the stereotype of games as a lesser form of fun? In this beautifully written, richly detailed, and inspiring book, Rossignol brings these abstract questions to life, immersing us in a vibrant landscape of gaming experiences. “We need more writers like Jim Rossignol, writers who are intimately familiar with gaming, conversant in the latest research surrounding games, and able to write cogently and interestingly about the experience of playing as well as the deeper significance of games.” —Chris Baker, Wired “This Gaming Life is a fascinating and eye-opening look into the real human impact of gaming culture. Traveling the globe and drawing anecdotes from many walks of life, Rossignol takes us beyond the media hype and into the lives of real people whose lives have been changed by gaming. The results may surprise you.” —Raph Koster, game designer and author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design “Is obsessive video gaming a character flaw? In This Gaming Life, Jim Rossignol answers with an emphatic ‘no,’ and offers a passionate and engaging defense of what is too often considered a ‘bad habit’ or ‘guilty pleasure.’” —Joshua Davis, author of The Underdog “This is a wonderfully literate look at gaming cultures, which you don't have to be a gamer to enjoy. The Korea section blew my mind.” —John Seabrook, New Yorker staff writer and author of Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

In The Cult of LEGO, Wired's GeekDad blogger John Baichtal and BrickJournal founder Joe Meno take you on a magnificent, illustrated tour of the LEGO® community, its people, and their creations. The Cult of LEGO introduces us to fans and builders from all walks of life. People like professional LEGO artist Nathan Sawaya; enigmatic Dutch painter Ego Leonard (who maintains that he is, in fact, a LEGO minifig); Angus MacLane, a Pixar animator who builds CubeDudes, instantly recognizable likenesses of fictional characters; Brick Testament creator Brendan Powell Smith, who uses LEGO to illustrate biblical stories; and Henry Lim, whose work includes a series of models recreating M.C. Escher lithographs and a full-scale, functioning LEGO harpsichord. Marvel at spectacular LEGO creations like: –A life-sized Stegosaurus and an 80,000-brick T. Rex skeleton –Detailed microscale versions of landmarks like the Acropolis and Yankee Stadium –A 22-foot long, 350-pound re-creation of the World War II battleship Yamato –A robotic, giant chess set that can replay historical matches or take on an opponent –A three-level, remote-controlled Jawa Sandcrawler, complete with moving conveyor belt Whether you're a card-carrying LEGO fanatic or just thinking fondly about that dusty box of LEGO in storage, The Cult of LEGO will inspire you to take out your bricks and build something amazing.

Each double-page spread features a different group of fascinating vehicles to pore over, such as trains, race cars, emergency vehicles, and even a junk yard.

The definitive visual history of the people, politics and events of the epic conflict that shaped the modern world, World War II From the build-up of hostility in the years leading up to the war, through to the reverberations still felt in the aftermath, this is a compelling, accessible and immediate history of perhaps the most complex, frightening and destructive event in global history, World War II. Discover how deep-seated local fears and hatreds escalated into one vast global conflict that was fought out to the bitter end. Find out about key battles, political and economic forces, individual leaders and technological advances that influenced the course of the war. Cross-referencing appears throughout and timelines and global maps establish an overview of each year of the conflict, from the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party to Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and the D-Day landings. Packed with images, including rarely seen colour photographs and unforgettable first person accounts, World War II is a uniquely accessible account of history's most devastating conflict.

Readers discover how airplanes get ready for takeoff.

Experiment with mysterious powders and slimy goo to form squishy biopolymers with cute faces!Create 6 custom gooey creatures in an aquatic terrarium. Pour neon gel that forms biopolymer blobs from the chemical reaction between sodium alginate and calcium chloride. 10 activities explore life cycles, adaptation, and traits that real animals use in the wild. Display your new friends in their very own specimen test tube habitat with custom stickers.