The Curiosity Box is a quarterly subscription box to satisfy your thirst for knowledge. Each box comes with 6-9 items that will not only entertain, but also educate you and your family. The subscription is $49.90 per quarter and a portion of all proceeds are donated to fund Alzheimer’s research.
If it a looks a little bit like a GeekFuel unboxing, that’s because the two companies are related.
Our three year old was SUPER pumped to open the box – he was super excited about the Octopus box (and indeed – this box is perfect for a geeky family!).
Each box comes with the Curiosity Quarterly by VSauce.
The quarterly is loaded with interesting, short articles for the curious-minded!
The articles are truly geeky, in a good way. The musings draw from math, science, history, and culture to create fun articles with an inquisitive edge.
This article explores the fascinating, and truly bizarre, origins of names for common foods like pumpernickel and ketchup.
Their was even a plug for Brain Candy Live, a touring stage show put on by VSauce’s Michael Stevens and Adam Savage of MythBusters.
The Curiosity Box now has a separate information card – it’s great for quick reference and for when someone steals your Curiosity Quarterly for bathroom reading. It contains a list of all the goodies this quarter!
As always, INQ the octopus is our guide through the box.
Everything in the box! The packaging for the box is top-notch – the individual items are in giftable packaging. The VSauce crew even goes so far as to call it limited edition collectible packaging!
Charles Lindburger Pin. Every Curiosity Box includes an awesome pin, and for this season, we got a Charles Lindburger pin! He’s based on the American aviator, Charles Lindbergh.
Charles Lindburger is the first all-beef patty to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean… and the rest is history! My daughter was cracking up reading through all the puns.
The backdrop in the pin case has a “realistic” photo of Lindburger – I think this is hilarious!
Cool and colorful! It’s made of enamel. One of my favorite features of this box now!
The Science Book Big Ideas Simply Explained ($20)
With over 225,000 copies in print, DK’s Big Ideas series has struck a chord with readers fascinated-but also intimidated-by complex subjects like philosophy, psychology, politics, and religion.
The newest title in this successful and acclaimed series is The Science Book, an inventive visual take on astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, and physics. With eye-catching artwork, step-by-step diagrams, and illustrations that break down complicated ideas into manageable concepts, The Science Book will have readers conversant in genetic engineering, black holes, and global warming in no time. Along the way are found mini-biographies of the most well-known scientists, and a glossary of helpful scientific terms.
For students, and students of the world, there is no better way to explore the fascinating, strange, and mysterious world of science than in The Science Book.
It’s a hardbound book that makes complex science topics easier to understand (and super fun too!).
The book is filled with big ideas about science. There’s a page about Carl Linnaeus for an instance, a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist. He is the one responsible for formalizing the binomial nomenclature.
Another page features Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist, chemist, and a pioneer of electricity and power. He is also credited as the inventor of the electrical battery and the guy who discovered methane.
There’s also a page featuring an expert in mathematical physics, James Clerk Maxwell. His most notable achievement was the formulation of electromagnetic radiation. Aside from photos, there are interesting illustrations included which makes learning more fun and exciting. These pages were picked pretty much at random to show the layout — the book covers just about every major scientific personality in Western history.
Boltron, The Robot Who Can. This month’s project is transforming an ordinary metal can into an upright, walking, wobbling, googly-eyed robot.
He looks pretty awesome!
The back of the box shows all of the pieces in the kit — it includes everything except the can and batteries.
Everything we need to create the robot. It even has a label to rebrand your soda can.
I like that they included an illustrated instruction page. Now, it’s time to look for the perfect can to transform!
We had a ridiculously great time building this with Grandpa! The parts were pretty tiny, so Grandpa did most of the work.
This robot can has seen more playtime already in the past few days than any recent toy! Now if only he cleaned floors…
INQ’s Hologram Generator. This cool Hologram generator make images float from a phone! The Curiosity Box link takes you to a collection of YouTube videos with hologram-suitable images.
A hologram is a three-dimensional image formed by the interference of light beams from a laser or other coherent light source.
Here’s the item that will do the trick! It is an inverted pyramid of films, each refracting the light from below toward a center point.
Just place the generator on your smartphone screen and watch the images float in front of you. this is a top view to show the setup, but you view the image from any of the four sides.
An easy to follow instruction page is also included.
Tried it and there’s the bird floating above my phone’s screen!
Rex’s Radical Ride T-Shirt. A wonderfully designed shirt for this season’s box! It has T Rex riding a planet-killing meteorite Slim Pickens style.
The box for the shirt is beautiful – if you gifted this, the recipient would think you bought it at an fancy science boutique.
This is really a comfy shirt in a nice shade of purple. It features a significant character from 66 million years ago, the T-Rex, but it has an awesome 80s vibe!
Love the design! The T-Rex here is making the maximum planetary impact! IT’S TOTALLY RAD!
Temporary Tattoo. Our box included a tattoo designed by Chris Ryniak, a designer based in Cleveland, Ohio.
It’s for the pizza-loving folks of the universe!
Curiosity Puzzle Box. This unique toy requires some clever thinking and manipulating to open!
The packaging is nice and elegant.
The box is very sleek, with natural and red-stained panels.
The trick to opening this is to swing the red panel out to make room for the unstained slab sandwiched in the middle to slide out without the two red pieces colliding — sliding the middle slab frees a peg, allowing the middle slab to rotate out of the way. Once you’ve solved the puzzle, you’ll be able to retrieve a gift inside. You can also use the box again to hide anything you want inside!
Inside was a perpetual calendar keychain.
It’s even engraved with INQ and the Curiosity Box logo.
When you line up the month and year along the top of the disk, the calendar at the bottom aligns with the days of the week, allowing you to determine on which day of the week any day will fall (out to the year 2060).
Volvox Downloadable Steam Game. Volvox is a puzzle game featuring the Trimoebas, the unicellular rolling animals that populate the primordial soup. Their dream is to build the first multicellular creatures. To succeed in this game, you need to dig tunnels, build towers, and construct bridges, having no tools but the Trimoebas triangular bodies and their special abilities!
To play the game, you simply enter the unique code from the back of the card on the Steam site and download to your computer.
This was another great box from the crew at VSauce. Their science books are always incredible, and they make great study guides for students of all ages. This box has perhaps the broadest appeal of any we get, at least amongst our family — we had a three year old and his grandfather both totally engaged in building the robot, and it’s always a challenge to get a chance to look at the books before our daughter absconds with them.
The Curiosity Box is loaded with tons of science-themed wonders and lots of FUN! They send awesome books we can’t help but geek out on, and we always look forward to the hands-on activity kits and the observational gadgets. There is something for everyone to learn, and it’s really the perfect subscription for learners of any age!
What do you think of this quarter’s box?
Visit The Curiosity Box to subscribe or find out more!
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