XKCD webcomics will now be a part of high school textbooks. The cartoonist Randall Munroe announced through his publisher that his recent book Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words will now figure in high school textbooks and will teach teenagers subjects such as chemistry, biology, and physics.
Randall Munroe is a CNU graduate with a degree in physics, he used to work at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.
The webcomic XKCD was started by Munroe after he started drawing and sketching some of his robotics work. The sketch artist uploaded the content into a server and gained millions of readers in a short period of time.
According to Munroe, the webcomic name XKCD is not an acronym, it’s just a word with no phonetic pronunciation “A treasured and carefully guarded point in the space of four-character strings” Says the author in his website resume.
Randall Munroe created his new book Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words in which he uses only the thousand most common words in the English language, and explains various things and how they work in a simple way.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is Munroe’s book publisher and after the editors in the textbook division saw how the author explained, what many people might consider complicated subjects, being explained so easily they realized that his explanations would work to augment high school textbooks.
The publisher announced that the 2017 digital and print edition of the Thing Explainer will explain students subjects such as chemistry, physics and biology. The textbooks will contain excerpts from Munroe’s book.
The author announced in a press release that some of the topics in the textbooks will include “The Pieces Everything is Made of”, meaning the periodic table, “Bags of Stuff Inside your”, meaning human torso and human biology, “The Bags of Water You’re made of”, explaining animal cells and “Heavy Metal Power Buildings”, that will explain nuclear reactors.
Munroe is currently working in other digital animations for the 2017-2018 curriculum and will add additional cartoons that didn’t appear in the Thing Explainer.
The author told the New York Times, that he hopes his excerpts will help break up the monotony of sciences textbooks. Most of the illustrations will include stick figures and simple sketches for better understanding.
Randall Munroe’s whole work is available at his website xkcd.com
Source: http://xkcd.com/