Randall Munroe, creator of popular webcomic XKCD, recently published a new book called Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, in which he uses only the thousand most common words in the English language to explain how a variety of things work, from locks to nuclear bombs. Monroe’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, also publishes textbooks, and when editors in the textbook division saw proofs of Monroe’s Thing Explainer, they realized that his simple explanations could be used to augment high school textbooks.
You know, the old strategy employed ineffectively by dad joke-tellers everywhere: get the #teens on your side with humor.
Luckily, Munroe's Thing Explainer comics are absurd enough in their hyper-simplicity that they have a shot at breaking down the walls of sarcasm and ennui encircling the most eye-rolling of high school students.
The publisher announced that the 2017 digital and print editions of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s chemistry, physics, and biology textbooks would contain excerpts from Thing Explainer that align with the topics presented to the students. The publisher said in a press release that some of these topics include "The Pieces Everything is Made of” (that is, the periodic table), "Bags of Stuff Inside You” (the human torso), "Tiny Bags of Water You're Made Of” (animal cells), and "Heavy Metal Power Buildings” (nuclear reactors), among others.
Munroe will also be designing some digital animations for the 2017-2018 curriculum as well as penning some additional cartoons that didn’t appear in Thing Explainer. The publisher says the previews of the text will be available in early 2017.
You can check out some of the Thing Explainer pages that will appear in the textbooks here (PDF).
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