We wanted to take our children with us in our indirect but interested way of learning the city and our team is full of them: as many as fifteen individuals from 3 to 13 years old.

Our children, each in his own way, trying to find out from their parents what we do at work and sometimes at home. "What kind of job is it to push buttons all day?" the little ones ask. Older children, who have begun to learn the basics of school life, ask how the subjects they study are related to our work, and teenagers wonder how they can help us and make money from it.

It turned out that telling kids about our craft is not so easy. Even those with a rich vocabulary can only think of the words "cities," "transportation," "pedestrians," and "routes."

The query is made, we must search! This way of thinking, searching and pondering led us to the idea of creating a "Kids' Room" section on our website, where we plan to place educational and explanatory materials on the topic of the city in general, as well as urban planning and transport engineering.

A playground is a kind of simulator that invites a child to start interacting with the city. At the same time, in our opinion, playgrounds should not be adapted only for a certain age, because even the most caring and attentive parent at a playground designed only for children can get bored and get lost in gadgets. We decided to systematize our experience of visiting playgrounds into a kind of rating. It is important to note that we made this rating based not only on our, "adult", impressions, but primarily on the opinions and reactions of our children.

We also would like to mention the already existing interactive and educational projects and institutions in the "children-transport-city" theme. So far, our own collection includes 12 places where children (and not only) can get pumped about transport engineering:

- The Bridge Museum
- Central Museum of Railroad Transport
- Russian Railways Museum
- Malaya October Railway. Southern track
- Malaya October Children's Railway. Northern track
- St. Petersburg Metro Museum
- Museum of electric transport
- TKK depot, Chizhik branch office
- Museum "Grand Maket Rossiya"
- Museum Layout Petrovskaya Aquatorium
- Duty stables in Pushkin
- Mini-City — an open air model of St. Petersburg near Gorkovskaya metro station

In the future we will supplement the list. And, of course, we would be grateful if you could share your favorite playgrounds and museums that we might have missed!

The children's room began with the words of a song from the fairy tale story "The Wizard of Oz". It is the one that comes to mind first when trying to find in the lochs of memory children's books about the city and everything associated with it. And for obvious reasons - the book is really "fiery", does not lose its relevance, and still excites the soul and imagination of young and big readers. Finding something just as captivating, and at the same time revealing the theme of the city for children was not easy, but we tried.

Visiting amazing bookstores, having searched in their home libraries, we gathered our collection of children's urban-transport-ecological-local history literature, which is now cozily placed in our open and accessible labrado library. All of the books have been tested by our young readers. Our personal insight: "all books about transportation are about travel."

All children's books about transport and the city we have structured for ourselves and, quite subjectively, divided into four groups:

Part 1, dedicated to bridges, railroads, subways, and other parts of the transportation infrastructure;

Part 2, on the city - the most comprehensive group;

Part 3, devoted to ecology and nature in the city (a bit of a pain, as without it);

Part 4 — a little bit about local history; could not stop and caught not only St. Petersburg, but also the world.

The list below shows only some of these publications; this did not include the series about Mule Meka, Hector the Architect, the Red Train, and others. This does not mean that they are not worthy of this top list, it's just that in our selection we tried to find works that are still unknown to us, we really wanted to educate ourselves. But anyway, we couldn't resist adding a few classics: Richard Scarry and Rothraut Susannah Berner.

We hope that you will find in this list works in which you have not yet immersed yourself. We'd love it if parents interested in the topic would share their book finds with us - we'll be sure to add to our list. And, invariably, we look forward to visiting "to read.

Part 1. Books about transport infrastructure and some kinds of transportation
1. "Secrets of railroads" Book with secrets
2. "Metro. The Underground City" by Natalia and Vasily Volkovy
3. "The subway on the ground and underground. History of the railroad in pictures".
4. "How is the bridge arranged?" Roman Belyaev
5. "Roads. From Paths to Highways" by Helga Pataki
6. "Subway Mouse" by Barbara Reed
7. "How It's Built. From Bridges to Skyscrapers" by David Macauley
8. "Bridges. Towers. Tunnels" A book with secrets.
9. "On Two Wheels. A History of the Bicycle" by Olivier Melano.

Part 2. Books about the city and urban planning
10. "Find and Show" Transportation. / In the city. Thierry Laval and Jan Couvain.
11. "The Little Car Book" by Richard Scarry.
12. "Time for Repair" by Emily Andren and Salla Savolainen
13. "Year Round Town." Rothraut Susanne Berner
14. "How Ole Jakop Went to Town" by Thorbjørn Egner
15. "The City of Good Deeds" by Richard Scarry
16. "How the City Works from Plumbing to Transportation" by Matz Wenblad
17. "The House of Little Dice" by Kunio Kato and Kenya Hirata

Part 3. Books about nature in the city
18. "The River" by Mark Martin.
19. "The Forest" by Mark Martin

Part 4. Local History Literature
20. "Literal Petersburg" by Elena Logunova and Alexander Golubev
21. "Atlas of the City" by Martin Haake and Georgia Cherry
22. "Transsib. The train is leaving!" Alexandra Litvina and Anya Desnitskaya