As Lucy watched, her heart in her throat, her bunny walked down the dock, turned toward the boat, and then there he was, safe on the deck! Lucy felt like hugging her bunny, even though you couldn’t hug a little picture on a computer screen. “You did it!” she whispered to her bunny, even though it was also silly to talk to a little picture on a computer screen.
Actually, Lucy had been the one who had done it. Then again, it had been a very easy puzzle to solve. All the bunny had to do was move forward three times and then turn to the right.
Nixie looked back to her own drowning bunny. “Pippa!” she called. “Preston!”
But Pippa and Preston were busy helping other campers.
“Colleen!” Nixie tried the head camp lady next. Even if Colleen wasn’t a coding camp teacher, she was still a grown-up. “My bunny is drowning!”
Colleen gave Nixie a small, sad smile and shook her head. Apparently, rescuing drowning bunnies wasn’t part of Colleen’s head-camp-lady job. Or else Colleen just wasn’t very good at computers. Some grown-ups were terrible at technology. Lucy’s dad, who won awards as a history teacher, could barely work the remote on the family TV.
“Campers, help each other!” Pippa called over to their group.
Nolan was already trying to help Vera.
“You can’t keep doing the same thing,” he told Vera, “and expect to get different results.”
It was just what Lucy had been thinking, but Nolan was more willing to say things out loud than she was.
Right away Nolan figured out that Vera was telling her bunny to turn left instead of right at the end.
“Try it again,” he told Vera, once she changed that one instruction.
Sure enough, Vera’s bunny was safe in the boat now, too.
“Nolan to the rescue!” Boogie said. “Nolan, friend to bunnies everywhere!”
As Nolan helped a kid at another desk, who looked even more upset about his drowned bunny than Vera had, Lucy took a peek at Nixie’s program. Nixie had told her bunny to move forward too many times. Of course the bunny would run out of dock if it kept walking and walking and walking and walking and walking.
But before she could say anything, Nolan was at Nixie’s side. He showed Nixie how to drag some of the Move forward commands out of the program.
This time, when Nixie ran the program, her bunny accomplished his mission. “Thanks, Nolan!” Nixie shouted.
Boogie’s bunny kept on splashing, but Boogie didn’t care.
“My bunny decided not to be a sailor anymore,” Boogie announced. “He’s going to be a champion swimmer instead. No, a champion diver. He likes diving into the water. The bigger the splash, the happier he is.”
“Coders!” Pippa called out. “Who is ready for the next challenge?”
All hands flew up, even Boogie’s.
Pippa showed them how to save their work before going on to the next challenge.
“Good-bye, little bunny,” Lucy said as she followed Pippa’s instructions.
She thought the bunny might have given her a happy little wave before disappearing.
* * *
—
Half an hour later, most of the campers had managed to steer their boats through a maze with a couple of twists and turns in it. This time there was buried treasure waiting at the end. Nolan’s boat zoomed over to its treasure. Lucy figured out the puzzle almost as quickly. Nixie was thrilled when her boat finally reached the finish line, with some help from Nolan. Vera’s boat got stuck on seaweed; she looked ready to cry until Nolan found a way to make it move forward again. Boogie decided his boat thought it was more fun to bang back and forth forever against the walls of the maze.
Then Preston announced it was time to take a coding break.
“Nooooo!” rose up loud wails from every desk.
“It’s good for brains to go outside and get fresh air,” Pippa said. “So take yours outside for fifteen minutes and pump some oxygen into them. Believe me, you’ll come back ready to solve even harder problems.”
“I can’t do coding,” Vera said, as the girls in Lucy’s group followed Colleen outside and drifted over to the playground basketball hoops. Nolan had already sunk one basket, and Boogie was trying—and failing—to bounce a basketball between his legs.
“None of us can do coding!” Nixie told her. “Well, except for Nolan. That’s why we’re in a coding camp. To learn how to do it. Besides, you were the best at making comics in the comics camp. You can’t be best at everything.”
Lucy wondered if she was ever going to be best at anything. What would her special thing turn out to be?
Maybe now was the time to ask Nolan to help her get good at basketball so she could start working on a Let’s Have Fun Club basketball badge. Maybe she’d turn out to have a talent for basketball she had never discovered before.
She moved closer to the hoop. “Can I play?”
“Sure!” Nolan said.
With a friendly grin, he bounced the basketball toward her, but it came her way too fast for her to be able to catch it. She felt klutzy as she scrambled to pick it up.
“Sorry,” Nolan said. “That was a bad pass.”
It had been a bad catch, but Lucy didn’t correct him.
“Can you explain how to shoot a basket again?” Lucy asked. “The way you did when we were pretending to be aliens? But with a real ball now?”
“Sure,” Nolan said again.
If an alien can do this, you can, too! Lucy told herself. They had played basketball in P.E. for a couple of weeks last year, and Lucy hadn’t been good at it then. But she hadn’t wanted to be good at it then as much as she wanted to be good at it now.
She did her best to follow Nolan’s careful instructions, but her ball did not soar through the air and go through the hoop. It plunked to the ground a few feet away.
Maybe this was how Vera had felt when she tried to follow the coding instructions but her boat got stuck in the seaweed.
On Lucy’s next try, the ball soared too high, way over the top of the backboard.
Even imaginary aliens would do better than this!
Just then Preston’s voice rang out from the door opening onto the playground. “Calling all coders! Back inside, everyone!”
Boogie ran to retrieve Lucy’s ball, but when he tossed it her way, she missed the ball again, and it bonked her on the side of her head.
At least if you coded a computer basketball game, and you got the program wrong, you wouldn’t get bonked with the ball!
Whatever Lucy’s special thing might be, she was pretty sure it wasn’t basketball.
Pippa hadn’t been joking when she said the camp should be called Computer Play Camp. She and Preston offered new coding challenges every day and gave tips for how to solve them. One day they talked about loops, which Lucy’s group already knew about from Nolan. But most of the camp time was spent playing with coding puzzles on their own.
On Friday, Preston began camp by saying, “Today we’re going to talk about if and then.”
Some kids laughed. It did sound like a strange thing to talk about. What could anyone possibly say about if?
“The words if and then connect two events,” Preston went on. “If the first one happens, then the second one happens, too. When those things don’t happen, something else does.”
Lucy still didn’t understand. She saw plenty of other blank faces, too. Only Nolan nodded. Of course Nolan would be the one to nod. If a question was asked, then Nolan knew the answer.
Maybe that was what Preston was talking about?
If a question was asked, then Nolan knew the answer.
“So,” Preston continued, “if it rains this afternoon, then you’ll have your brain break indoors in our classroom. Or else, we’ll send you outside. Computer coding is full of if-then-else commands, called ‘conditionals,’ which we’ll talk about in a few minutes. But life is f
ull of them, too. Share some ideas with your buddies.”
Nixie went first in their group. “If I get a dog, then I’ll be happy forever. What am I supposed to say for the else thing?”
Nolan helped her out. “Or else, you’ll keep asking until your wish comes true. Okay, here’s mine: If Nixie gets a dog, then the rest of us will be happy forever. Or else, we’ll have to listen to her complaining for all eternity.”
Nixie grinned at Nolan.
“If you get a dog, then you’ll have to walk it,” Boogie warned her.
“I’ll want to walk it,” Nixie replied.
“That’s what you think now,” Boogie said darkly.
“If Nixie gets a dog, then I’ll help her walk it,” Vera promised.
Lucy had been thinking, If I want to get good at coding, then I’m going to need to practice coding on the computer at home. Or else, I’ll never be able to make a kangaroo dance like Elena does. She had already asked her mom about having her own hour of computer time, and her mom had said, as Lucy knew she would, Well, fair is fair. But would this make Elena get sniffy and crabby?
Lucy didn’t want to think about that now. Instead she just said, “If Nixie gets a dog, then I’ll help her walk it, too.”
Maybe she really could get a dog-walking badge. The badge requirements could be: walk a dog, pick up dog poop, go running with a dog, play fetch with a dog, and take a dog to a dog park. Of course, step one would be: find a dog to walk.
Pippa next explained how conditionals were used in coding. If you were trying to steer a boat through a maze, the way they had been doing, you could plan ahead for what the boat should do depending on which way the maze turned, rather than having to code each twist and turn separately.
If the path turned right, then turn the boat to the right. Or else, the boat continues to go straight.
If the path turned left, then turn the boat to the left. Or else, the boat continues to go straight.
That sounded pretty clear to Lucy.
“Okay, coders, steer the boat!” Preston told them.
* * *
—
Fifteen minutes later, Vera sat slumped in front of her computer, staring at the screen as if she could propel her boat through the watery maze with her eyeballs.
“I think my computer is broken,” she said.
Lucy shot Vera a sympathetic glance. Computers did break, usually at the worst possible time. She often heard her mother saying angry things in Spanish to the computer at home when she was trying to enter grades for her students. But somehow she didn’t think Vera’s computer was broken this time.
“I think my boat is broken,” Boogie said. “Or maybe it just likes crashing into walls. Maybe a computer-game company will hire me to create a game called Shipwreck. The winner is the person whose ship gets wrecked first. Or most. Or worst.”
Vera didn’t smile.
“You’re not even trying,” she told Boogie. “But I am. And the more I try, the worse it gets. And my ship does not like being wrecked. It hates it!”
As Nolan started helping Vera figure out what was wrong with her code, Lucy looked over from her screen to his. Her program had twelve steps in it; his had eight. Both of them had gotten their boat through the maze without crashing, but he had done it faster.
Once Vera’s boat was on its way again, Lucy pointed this out to Nolan. “Your code is shorter than mine. Is shorter better?”
“Remember when Nixie was teaching the aliens how to walk a dog?” Nolan asked.
Lucy nodded. That would have been hard to forget.
“And how glad we were when she figured out how to shorten the instructions? Coding is sort of like that. But your code worked great, Lucy. All your codes have worked great.”
Lucy was surprised Nolan had noticed. He must be a very noticing kind of person. It felt good to get a coding compliment from someone who was so great at coding himself.
“Anyway,” Nolan went on, “the cool thing is that there’s never just one solution for a problem. There’re always different ways to solve any problem.”
“What different ways are there to solve my problem?” Nixie asked him.
Nolan gazed over at her screen.
“Not that problem! My real problem! The problem of how to get a dog!”
“Well,” Nolan said slowly, as if he was already working out an algorithm for “how to get a dog” in his head. “You could find a dog. You could buy a dog. You could adopt a dog from a shelter.”
“But my parents won’t let me!” Nixie protested. “They say dogs cost too much and are too much work.”
“Or you could borrow a dog,” Nolan finished.
“You could borrow my dog,” Boogie offered. “You could walk him every single day. I’ll give you extra-big poop bags, too.”
Nixie’s face lit up, as if she had been dreaming of extra-big poop bags all her life. “Do you mean it?”
“Cross my heart.” Boogie made a crossing motion that was more over his stomach than his heart, in Lucy’s opinion.
Nixie turned to Vera and Lucy, the two who had said, If Nixie gets a dog, then I’ll help her walk it.
“Did you mean it, too?”
“Well,” Vera said uncomfortably. “It was more that I had to say something with if-then in it. I’m not a dog person. But I do want you to get a dog, Nixie. You know I do.”
“I meant it,” Lucy said.
Maybe she’d turn out to be a dog person.
Maybe she’d turn out to be an amazing dog person. Maybe dogs would be her special thing, the way they were Nixie’s. It would be all right to have the same special thing as someone else so long as you weren’t in the same family, she decided—the same way Nolan and Elena both had coding as their special thing.
She could already see a dog-walking badge taped onto her Let’s Have Fun Club sash.
It rained that weekend, so it wasn’t dog-walking weather. Lucy had a feeling even Nixie wouldn’t find it fun to pick up extra-large dog poop in the rain.
But a rainy Saturday was perfect weather for coding.
First Elena had her hour of computer time and then she lay on the family room couch lost in a book.
So, boldly, Lucy sat down at the computer, set the timer for her own hour, called up the same computer website they used at camp, and clicked on the maze program. It was thrilling to send her boat sailing along merrily through even harder mazes, all by herself, without Preston or Pippa, without Nolan—just Lucy.
Half an hour later, Lucy heard Elena set her book down on the coffee table. She turned around to see Elena staring her way.
“What are you doing?” Elena asked, in an accusing tone.
What did Elena think she was doing?
“Coding,” Lucy said, as if she did coding all the time, as if she had just as much right to use the computer as Elena did—and didn’t she?
“Great!” Elena snapped. “You and I only have one computer for homework and coding and everything. So now I’m going to have to wait around all the time for my turn until your turn is done?”
Well, Lucy had been the one who had done all the waiting around so far.
“You already had your hour,” Lucy made herself say.
“But now I need the computer for homework,” Elena shot back.
Lucy looked at the timer. “I’ll be done in twenty-eight minutes.” Though she had just used up two minutes arguing with Elena.
Elena snatched up her book and stomped upstairs. Lucy could hear the door of their bedroom slam behind her.
There were still twenty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds left on the timer. But it was hard to steer a boat through a maze when the sound of the slammed door was ringing in Lucy’s ears.
* * *
—
Week two of coding camp began with a presentation from a guest speaker who used coding to make special light and sound effects for a
local dance company. She looked exactly the way Lucy expected a dancer to look: tall and slim, with her hair pulled back tightly from her face in a non-messy bun. The video she showed was amazing. Lucy hadn’t known coding could be used for real-life dances by human beings, not just animated dances by cartoon creatures.
After the presentation, Preston said this would be the week for dance choreography. Choreography meant telling dancers the sequence of steps and movements to perform.
This would be the week Lucy learned how to make her own dances for her own hipping-hopping kangaroo!
“Let’s code a dance right now, in our room,” Pippa said. She and Preston liked what they called “unplugged” activities, where you learned about coding without even using a computer. Lucy thought those activities were fun, too.
Pippa turned on some music with a catchy beat, at a volume low enough that she could speak over it.
“First, let’s make a list of possible moves to include in our dance.”
What would count as a dance move? Lucy tried to remember what steps Elena’s kangaroo and hedgehog had done, but she didn’t know the names of any of them.
The other kids seemed baffled, too, even Nolan. So Pippa demonstrated a few: a clap high, a dab, a floss, and a funny one called Gangnam.
“Now let’s put them in an algorithm,” Pippa said. “Let’s decide which order to do them in—and how long to do each one. Two measures? Four measures? Six?”
Pippa counted out the beats of the music. “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.” She explained that each “one two three four” was a measure, and that she’d just counted out three measures.
After ten more minutes of demonstration, Pippa had the sequence of dance motions written on the classroom Smart Board with the number of measures, chosen by the campers, next to each one.
“And we’ll just keep on following this choreography code, in a loop, till the music ends. Get it?” Pippa asked.
Lucy Lopez Page 3
