Welcome back to another edition of Pickstarter, in which we highlight our favorite crowdfunded projects on sites like Indie-gogo and Kickstarter, where people are turning to the consumer for help making their dream projects a reality.

Pick #1 – An Educational Colorimeter Kit 

A colorimeter is a tool used in labs around the world to measure a solution’s properties by how much light passes through it versus how much light it absorbs. It’s a handy tool with a number of different applications. The folks at IO Rodeo are looking to make an affordable kit for educators to allow students to build their own colorimeter and lead them through experiments with the finished build. Consider this the first step in a young person’s quest to make the urine cleaner from Waterworld a reality.

Pick #2 – Reading With Pictures: The Graphic Textbook 

As comic lovers, we’ve known for years how engaging a graphic novel can be. Last year, a study at Northwestern University backed us up in a study that said children retain information better when presented with graphical depictions. Reading with Pictures is teaming with top talent from the comics industry, as well as educators, to create a textbook for grades 3-6 in a variety of topics. Maybe if we had this book when we were in school we wouldn’t have felt the need to doodle in ours.

Pick #3 – Fairy Quest

One noticeable bonus of the advent of crowd sourcing is artists being able to bypass publishers entirely and take their books directly to the people. That is exactly what comic pros Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos are doing with their latest, Fairy Quest. Let’s be honest, fairy tales are all the rage right now, and normally we’d start to back off the trend, but when it’s created by this team, you have to give it a second look. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf rebel against their story and start uniting the fairy tale world against whoever has been orchestrating their fates. This hardcover will look amazing next to your collection of Fables and Zenescope’s Grimm Fairy Tales. Now if only someone would make the Humpty Dumpty/Guantanamo Bay hybrid we’ve yearned for. “You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns… And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall! You need me on that wall!”

If you or someone you know has a project you’d like us to talk about, email the relevant information to [email protected].