“When do we get to start telling stuff to computers?” a kid asked from the back of the room.
Lucy sympathized. Even though everything Preston and Pippa were saying was so interesting, Lucy’s fingers itched to start tapping computer keys.
“Soon,” Pippa said. “But first we want you to practice thinking the way computers think. So get into small groups—four desks, or maybe five. Each of you, take something you’re really good at and try to explain it, step by step, to a group of aliens who just landed here on Earth. The list of steps to do something is called an algorithm. The rest of you, pretend to be the aliens, and ask about whatever you don’t understand. Got it?”
Lucy knew Boogie and Nolan were best friends, and Nixie was already friends with a quiet girl named Vera. The four of them started pulling their desks together. Pippa had said there could be “maybe five” desks in a group. So Lucy shoved her desk close to the other four and was rewarded by another big grin from Boogie. This time Lucy gave him an equally big grin in return.
“I’ll go first,” Nixie announced. “What I’m good at is walking a dog.”
“I thought you didn’t have a dog,” Nolan said.
“I don’t. But I’d be great at walking a dog if I did have one. Okay, aliens, first of all, a dog is an extremely wonderful kind of pet. A pet is a special kind of animal that lies in bed with you and loves you better than anyone else in the world. And an animal…” Nixie started to look worried. “This is going to take forever.”
“Just tell us how to walk the dog,” Vera suggested.
“Okay. First you pick up a leash. Do I have to say what a leash is?”
“No!” the others said. It really would take forever to explain absolutely everything to an alien.
Nixie continued, “Stoop down. Then clip the leash on the dog’s collar. Then say, ‘Come on, boy!’ if it’s a boy dog, or ‘Come on, girl!’ if it’s a girl dog. Then start walking. I mean, hold on to the leash and start walking toward the door. Open the door. Then close the door. I mean, close the door after the dog gets through the door, or else you’d squish the dog, which would be terrible. Then keep on walking. Do I have to tell about how to pick up the dog poop if the dog makes a poop?”
“No!” everyone said again.
“So that’s how you walk a dog,” Nixie concluded. “Did I miss anything?”
“You didn’t tell us what walking is,” Nolan pointed out.
Lucy remembered Preston had said computers would need to have even something this basic explained to them.
“What walking is? You guys are really dumb aliens if you don’t even know what walking is. Walking is when you take one step, then another.”
“How do you take a step?” Nolan asked. He made it sound as if he truly wanted to know.
“You—you—just take a step! Like this!” Nixie got up and demonstrated. “See?”
“We—have—no—eyes,” Nolan said in what was clearly a pretend-alien voice. “We—cannot—see.”
Nixie’s shoulders sagged. “This is too hard!” she wailed.
Lucy felt sorry for her. “Maybe say, move one foot forward one foot. Wait, that sounds totally confusing. So, move your right foot forward twelve inches. Then move your left foot forward twelve inches farther than you moved the right foot. Then move the right foot forward twelve more inches. Then move the left foot.”
She felt proud of her explanation of walking, but at the rate she was going, it really would take forever just to explain to an alien how to keep on walking. How did anyone walk a dog? It seemed impossible, and yet people did it all the time.
“You can use a loop,” Nolan suggested. “That’s a coding term for repeating the same sequence of instructions over and over again until you tell it to stop.”
Boogie was right: Nolan did know everything. He knew stuff about coding before the coding camp even began. And yes—a loop would solve the problem completely!
Nixie’s face brightened. “Okay! Then you do a loop thingy where you keep taking steps forward forever and ever until the dog makes a poop, and then you pick up the poop, and go home again. The end!”
Nolan opened his mouth as if to ask Nixie a few more questions, then shut it.
“Vera, you go next,” Nixie said.
Vera furrowed her brow. “I don’t think I’m really good at anything.”
Nixie stared at her. “You’re really good at tons of things! Tell an alien how to draw a comic.”
Vera shook her head. “That would take forever. And Nolan said aliens can’t see. How can you draw something if you can’t see what you’re drawing?”
“Some aliens can see,” Nolan said.
Nixie glared his way. “Now you tell me!” But Lucy could tell she was joking.
“Or tell them how to play the piano,” Nixie suggested.
“That would take forever, too. Well, maybe I can tell them how to play Chopsticks.”
Vera did a good job with her explanation, in Lucy’s opinion. She had never played the piano herself, but she thought she could play Chopsticks now, if she could remember how to find the two white keys right next to each other that started off the piece.
Nolan told the aliens how to shoot a basketball. Apparently his aliens could see, too.
Boogie said, “What I’m best at is being funny, but I don’t think I could tell aliens how to be funny. Wait—I could tell them how to lick a quarter and make it stick onto their foreheads. If they have foreheads. And if they have quarters.”
Even though everything about the coding camp had been great so far, Lucy felt nervous about her turn. What was she really good at? Jigsaw puzzles, maybe, but Elena had acted as if that was a dumb, easy thing to be good at. She loved reading, but the kids in their group knew how to read, so that wouldn’t be an interesting thing to explain, even if she could figure out how to explain it. Bracelet making? Elena’s rejection of her “copied” bracelet still stung. The only thing left was hair-styling, and she certainly wasn’t great at that, either. But she had to say something.
“Okay, aliens,” Lucy said, once Boogie’s aliens had well-licked coins stuck onto their foreheads. She could hear her voice coming out small and wobbly. “I hope you have hair. Because I’m going to tell you how to make a double bun.”
“So how was it?” Lucy’s dad asked her, as she buckled herself into the back seat of the car for the ride home from coding camp.
It was wonderful!
Lucy turned toward Elena, who was in the back seat already, gazing out the window as if she had no interest whatsoever in how Lucy answered the question.
She wanted to ask Elena, Did Preston and Pippa do the same things on the first day of your camp? Did they teach you how to talk to aliens?
She wanted to tell Elena, Now I understand why you want to be on the computer all the time. Even talking about coding is tons of fun!
But something about the stiff way Elena held her shoulders and looked pointedly in the opposite direction made Lucy hesitate.
Swallowing down her enthusiasm, Lucy said casually, “It was okay.”
“Just okay?” her mother asked. “What did you learn so far about coding?”
If she had been alone with her parents in the car, she would have said, I learned computers are dumb, and aliens are dumb, too, and you have to spell out everything for them, like totally everything. And I did a good job of figuring out how to tell aliens what walking is, and how to make a double hair bun, and I think I might turn out to be good at coding, because I knew some of the answers to the teachers’ questions even though I felt too shy to raise my hand and say them.
But Elena kept staring out the window even though there was nothing to see but the same old walls of their same old elementary school.
Lucy took a deep breath. “I didn’t really learn anything. It was just, you know, an introduction kind of day.”
With a noisy exhale, Elena t
urned away from the window. “It looks like your camp is more basic than mine,” she said, sounding relieved. “On our first day, we learned how precise and exact you have to be when you give instructions to computers. Almost like you’re talking to aliens who just landed on Earth from outer space. It was supercool.”
Now what was Lucy supposed to say?
We learned the same things, and it WAS supercool.
She had a feeling that would be the wrong thing to say.
So she didn’t say anything.
Once they returned home, Elena raced inside to start her hour of computer time before setting the table for dinner. Was Lucy going to start having her own hour of computing time now, to do her own coding projects? Well, once she learned how to do them. What would Elena say then? Lucy pushed that thought away.
Lucy and her father lingered in the car for a moment after the others had gone inside. “If you aren’t enjoying the coding camp,” he told Lucy, “you don’t have to do it. Just because Elena loves something doesn’t mean you have to love it, too. It’s fine for you and Elena to love different things.”
But was it fine for them to love the same things?
Apparently not.
“I do like coding camp,” Lucy whispered. “I like it a lot.”
Her dad raised an eyebrow. She knew she certainly hadn’t made it sound as if she liked it.
“Just not as much as Elena,” she added, even though Elena wasn’t there to hear her.
While Elena was on the computer, Lucy made sure not to loiter behind her chair. Maybe, even though they had always done their badges together, Lucy should make up some new Let’s Have Fun Club badges she could earn by herself, without Elena’s assistance. Vera could help her earn a piano badge. Nolan could help her earn a basketball badge. Nixie could help her earn a dog-walking badge—if they could find a dog to walk. Boogie could help her earn a magic tricks badge; sticking a quarter on your forehead was sort of like magic.
But most of all, she wanted to earn a coding badge with Elena.
After supper both girls went upstairs to read for a while on their matching twin beds in the room they shared.
Before she had even turned the first page, Elena closed her book. “I’m still hungry. Do you want to bake some cookies?”
“Sure!” Lucy said. “We can get started on the cookie-baking badge!”
Elena rolled her eyes, but she hopped up from the bed and was first down the stairs to the kitchen.
The cookie-baking badge had six items on the badge list:
1. Bake chocolate chip cookies because they are the most famous cookies ever.
2. Bake cookies cut out in shapes with cookie cutters. Use at least ten different shapes.
3. Frost a batch of cookies.
4. Make some kind of bar cookies, like brownies or blondies.
5. Make Abuelita’s Mexican wedding cookies.
6. Create your own cookie recipe.
Plus, even though the handbook didn’t say it, the cookies for the badge had to be made from scratch. You couldn’t get a cookie-baking badge for dumping gobs of premade refrigerated dough on a baking sheet and sticking it in the oven for ten minutes.
“So what kind should we make tonight?” Elena asked, as she carried their family recipe box out of the pantry and set it on the kitchen table.
Chocolate chip cookies were definitely the easiest, since they had made them so many times before, though those times didn’t qualify because they hadn’t been done for the badge.
“Chocolate chip!” Lucy announced.
“With nuts?” Elena asked.
It was a joke question: they both loved cookies with nuts.
“Duh!” they said at the same time.
Lucy giggled, and then Elena giggled. Then they were both laughing “like hyenas.” That’s what their father called it whenever they laughed hysterically over things he thought weren’t even that funny.
As they pulled out the flour and sugar canisters, baking soda, cinnamon, and bags of chocolate chips and chopped walnuts from the pantry shelves, Lucy thought maybe she should have chosen cookie baking to teach the aliens during camp.
She would have had to explain measuring to the aliens: how you scoop the flour into the measuring cup and level it off with the side of a butter knife, but you have to pack the brown sugar in nice and tight. When she told the aliens how to cream the butter together with the brown sugar, she’d have to find a way to let them know when it had been creamed long enough. She could make a loop for the creaming motions, but when exactly would the loop stop?
“If you were telling aliens to keep mixing the dough, using one of those coding loops,” she asked Elena, as she was halfway through smushing the butter and sugar together, “how would you tell them when it was mixed enough to stop?”
She remembered too late that this was the wrong question to ask Elena.
Elena’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, we didn’t learn anything today, it was just introduction stuff,” she said, in a high-pitched little-girl voice.
“Well, it was this one boy, Nolan, who told me about the loops,” Lucy hastened to explain. “He knows everything there is to know about computers. Coding is definitely his thing.” Though Boogie had said Nolan knew everything there was to know about everything—so maybe everything was Nolan’s thing.
Elena broke two eggs to add to the batter. Then Lucy started adding in the flour, baking soda, and salt. As the dough got stiffer and stiffer, Lucy’s arm began to ache, but she didn’t ask Elena to take a turn, in case Elena was still mad about Lucy’s loop question.
Lucy did most of the work dropping the dough in rounded spoonfuls onto the lightly greased baking trays, too; Elena had to text Juniper to tell her something she had forgotten to tell her at school.
“Ow!” Lucy yelped, as her wrist touched the side of the last tray, hot from the oven. But the cookies did look scrumptious: golden brown, with the chocolate chips still a bit soft and gooey.
“Maybe baking is your thing,” Elena suggested to Lucy. “Gardening for Dad, dancing for Mom, coding for me, and baking for you.”
“Maybe,” Lucy said doubtfully.
With her mouth full of warm cookie, she had to admit they had turned out extra-yummy. And it was wonderful to have the first cookie-baking badge requirement crossed off.
But she also had a sore arm, specks of dough in her hair, and a burned wrist.
If it hadn’t been for the badge, Lucy would have been just as glad if she had figured out how to give nice clear instructions to the aliens, and they had baked the cookies for her.
“All right,” Pippa told the campers the next day. “Everyone, come and get a notebook.”
By “notebook,” Lucy saw, Pippa meant a skinny little laptop computer. A computer that would be her very own for the entire month of coding camp. They were even supposed to make sticky labels for them. Lucy wrote her label in big bold letters with hot-pink permanent marker: LUCY LOPEZ.
It was pretty amazing to have a computer with her name on it. Hers!
It took a long time to hand out the computers and then to write and decorate the labels. Preston and Pippa didn’t seem to mind. Lucy’s regular classroom teacher, Mrs. Merriweather, was always in a hurry to get another lesson done. One day when they had a fire drill during math time, Lucy had thought Mrs. Merriweather might even burst into tears. But Preston and Pippa acted like they had all the time in the world.
“The more you play, the more you learn,” Pippa said. “We’re going to be doing a lot of playing this month. You could even call this Computer Play Camp.”
That sounded totally fine to Lucy.
Once everyone had logged on to the computer and pulled up the coding website, Preston said, “Yesterday we learned that a list of instructions is called an algorithm. Today we’ll be coding, which is turning an algorithm into language the computer can understand. So let’s start
coding!”
The campers cheered.
The first challenge for the afternoon was to tell a little bunny how to walk down a dock and climb into a sailboat.
The way you told the bunny to do things was with a coding language Pippa called “block coding.” Instructions, like Turn left or Move forward, were printed in little blocks on the left-hand side of the screen. You picked which instructions you wanted to use, dragged them over to the right-hand side of the screen, and clicked them into place.
If you did it right, the bunny would end up on the boat, ready to sail away.
If you did it wrong, the bunny would fall into the water.
You couldn’t tell if the bunny was going to be safe and dry on the boat or soaking wet in the ocean until you clicked Run, for “run program.”
Then the program either worked, or it didn’t.
Nolan’s program worked right away, of course.
Nixie’s, Boogie’s, and Vera’s didn’t.
“My bunny is drowning!” Nixie wailed. Lucy could tell Nixie didn’t mind, though. Nixie liked to make everything as dramatic as possible.
“My bunny likes being wet, don’t you, bunny?” Boogie said. “He’s sort of a fish bunny. Or maybe a fish disguised as a bunny.”
Vera kept clicking Run over and over again, as if she’d get a different result each time. SPLASH! She clicked Run again. SPLASH! And again. With each SPLASH, Vera looked more and more worried.
Lucy hadn’t clicked Run yet. If her first, easiest program didn’t work, maybe it would mean coding wasn’t her thing, just like Elena had said.
“Did yours work?” Nixie asked her.
“I didn’t try it,” Lucy confessed.
“Lucy!” Nixie stood up and reached over to Lucy’s computer touchpad, positioned the cursor on Run, and clicked.
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