Spotlight on Coding Club! #4 (Girls Who Code, Band 4) - Hardcover

Buch 4 von 7: Girls Who Code

Schusterman, Michelle

 
9780399542541: Spotlight on Coding Club! #4 (Girls Who Code, Band 4)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 039954254X ISBN 13: 9780399542541
Verlag: Penguin Workshop, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Perfect for fans of The Babysitters Club and anyone interested in computer science, this series is published in partnership with the organization Girls Who Code!

It's almost time for the talent show at school, and Erin couldn't be more excited. It's her time to take center stage! Plus, she and her friends from coding club are putting together an awesome coding program for the show.

But Erin has a big secret: she has anxiety. And when things start piling up at home and school, she starts having trouble handling everything. Her friends from coding club have always been there for her, but will they be as understanding when the going gets tough? Sometimes in coding--like in friendship--things don't go exactly as planned, but the outcome can be even better than you'd imagined.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michelle Schusterman is the author of I Heart Band, a Scholastic Reading Club pick, The Kat Sinclair Files, and Olive and the Backstage Ghost. She's also an instructor at Writopia Lab, a nonprofit organization that offers creative-writing workshops for children and teens from all backgrounds. Find out more at michelleschusterman.com.

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Chapter One

My heart raced as I hurried down the corridor, glancing at my watch. First day back from spring break, and I was almost two minutes late for coding club—but I had a really good reason.

I burst through the door, and over the tops of the computers, all heads turned toward me. Only one way to handle a mildly embarrassing moment like this.

Doubling over, I clutched my sides. “Water,” I wheezed. “Water.”

Everyone started giggling. From the third row, I saw my coding club besties—Lucy Morrison, Sophia Torres, Maya Chung, and Leila Devi—laughing with the rest of the class. At the front of the room, Mrs. Clark smiled at me.

“Everything okay, Erin?”

I straightened, fanning my face with my hand. “Yes! Sorry I’m late, but I have an announcement.”
Mrs. Clark crossed her arms and leaned against her desk. “Funny, I have a few announcements myself. But why don’t you go first?”

“Why thank you,” I said, with an exaggerated bow that got more snickers from the class. Then I pulled a folded-up flyer from my jeans pocket. “I just saw Ms. Davies printing these.” I held the flyer out for everyone to read the three words at the top, in a giant font:
 
ALL THE TALENTS!
 
“The talent show, yeah,” said Bradley Steinberg. “Everyone already knows that’s next Friday. I’m doing a stand-up act!”

I wiggled the flyer. “But this year, the film club is working with the theater club to do a different format. Everyone who wants to enter will make a video. And the talents can be anything, like animation or . . . or robot building!” I grinned at Leila, and her wide blue eyes lit up. Leila was super into robotics.

Then I pointed at Maya, our school’s resident fashion expert. Her short black hair was swooped over to the right and pinned down with, like, a dozen star-shaped barrettes that matched the pattern on her purple leggings. “Or clothes you designed! It could be anything. And then everyone can watch the videos and vote!”

“Which was actually going to be my first announcement,” Mrs. Clark said, smiling as she gestured for me to sit down. I hurried over to the empty seat between Maya and Lucy, as Mrs. Clark continued. “So it’s true: This year’s talent show is going to have a new format. Like Erin said, anyone who wants to enter can make a video, then upload it to our school’s video platform. Then they can share them through a web app that all students will have access to. After everyone votes, the top three finalists will perform at an assembly a week from this coming Friday.”

To my right, Lucy sat up straighter, one of her long, thick braids falling over her shoulder. “A web app?”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Clark said, eyes twinkling behind her glasses. “The film club will be compiling the videos, and our school already has the video platform, but the web app doesn’t exist . . . yet.”

She raised her eyebrows meaningfully, and murmurs broke out.

“Do we get to design it?” Sophia asked eagerly. She’d turned away from her computer to stretch out her super-long legs, and I noticed her track shoes were extra muddy. Sophia lived with her parents, three sisters, and her grandmother (who’d moved here from Puerto Rico to help out), so she didn’t usually have money for extras.

Mrs. Clark nodded. “It’s a pretty big project with some tight deadlines. But I think you’re all up for the challenge!”

“Awesome,” Lucy said fervently. Maya and I exchanged a grin because Lucy looked like she’d just won the lottery. We all loved coding, but Lucy couldn’t get enough of it. Her mother was a computer scientist—one of the first African American women at her company—and the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

And honestly, I was just as excited as Lucy about this project. I was definitely entering the talent show. Performing was 100 percent my thing. Or maybe 90 percent, because I had coding club and film club. One of the drawbacks of my interests, though, was that theater didn’t fit into my schedule. I still missed being onstage.

Besides, even more fun projects to work on were exactly what I needed. Anything to keep me from thinking about The Thing I Wasn’t Supposed to Think About.

As everyone logged into their computers, Maya leaned over and nudged me.

“So what’s your act gonna be?”

I adopted a look of mock innocence. “What act?”

“Come on,” Maya said teasingly. “There’s no way you’re not entering the talent show. Singing, dancing, doing impressions and silly voices—you actually have all the talents. Or, at least, a lot of them.”

“Moi?” I gasped, placing a hand on my chest. On my other side, Lucy started chuckling. “Vhat are zees talents you speak of? Vhat zilly voices? Vhat dancing? Vhat—”
“Erin?”

I jumped, startled, and realized Mrs. Clark was looking at me. “Vhat? I mean, yes?”

“Mind if we get started?”

“But of course,” I drawled, and Maya shook her head, grinning.

For the next ten minutes, Mrs. Clark explained more about how the web app would work. Students and teachers would register with their e-mail accounts to get access. Then contestants would upload a video, and anyone could view it if they were signed in. She started a task list on the board, and soon everyone was calling out suggestions.

“Web design,” Maya said. “All the Talents sounds like a reality show—maybe we can make the web app look like it really is one!”

“Each student can only vote once, right?” Lucy chimed in. “We’ll have to program it so that once you click on a vote button, you can’t click on any others.”

“There should be a notification system,” added Maddie Lewis. “An easy way to let everyone know who the finalists are.”

“Maybe we could program it to automatically send updates, too!” added her twin brother, Mark.
“Like who’s in the lead every day. That might get more kids to watch and vote.”

The suggestions kept coming, and soon the board was filled with Mrs. Clark’s writing. She hadn’t been kidding—this was a huge project.

And then we had to spend another ten minutes figuring out which ideas we needed. Like we learned at the hackathon (a day of coding where teams won prizes at the end), adding too many things could create “feature creep” (when a project became impossible to use because it had too much going on). So we had to cut down the list. A lot.

After all that, though, we still had to start on the real work!
“Next step: splitting into groups and dividing up these tasks,” Mrs. Clark said. Maya and I automatically scooted our chairs closer to Lucy. On her other side, Leila and Sophia did the same thing.

“Why split up a dream team?” I asked Mrs. Clark, and she laughed. It was true, though. We weren’t just best friends; we were an awesome team, too—like at the hackathon in the fall, when our robot had turned the event into an epic dance party.

“Any of these tasks sound particularly interesting?” Mrs. Clark asked.

Lucy was gazing at the board. “I was thinking about the voting feature...

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Verlag
Penguin Workshop
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
039954254X
ISBN 13 
9780399542541
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
144
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Terminal Video
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