“Stately Academy…is the secret within a secret.”
Stately Academy isn’t your regular school. It’s big, creepy, and full of mysteries for Hooper, Eni, and Josh to solve. We follow the journey of Hooper, a new kid at Stately Academy trying to find her place, on the basketball field, in the classroom, navigating friendships and bullies, and being a misunderstood daughter while she tries to uncover the reason for strange happenings at school. We also meet Eni, a smart, talented basketball star and Josh who starts as one of Hooper’s bullies but becomes one of the “Coders” crew after showcasing his skills in crafting code.
The day that Hooper discovers the robotic owls, is the day that her life changed at Stately Academy. From this point the reader dives into the mystery of why there are robots in the school, what secrets the janitor’s school shed holds, and why many of the adults at the school seem to weird the students out. Secret Coders is a graphic novel set which comes in very handy as Hooper, Eni, and Josh start to realize all the code around them that are central to the mysteries in the school. The illustrations help the reader to envision what the code is doing through the main storytelling! One of the other great features in this book is that the story is not passive, but there are calls to action and prompts for the reader to either complete the code based on what they’ve learned or to try to guess what the completed code is intended to do – hint there’s lots of code puzzles to control robotic turtles! Additionally, we get to see some intersections between culture and technology. There’s one code exercise the reader is encouraged to try which is also a brief mandarin handwriting lesson.
Secret Coders entertains even though it teaches because the story has villains, conflict between characters, including Hopper and her mom, Hopper and some of the girls’ basketball players, and the mystery behind the disappearance of Hopper’s father. The story is accessible, and the code is easy to follow, which is largely attributed to the comic-style presentation of the story.
Find the Secret Coders Series on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074CF68VS.
For reviews of other children’s books featuring diversity in technology and engineering, see STEM Area: Technology and STEM Area: Engineering.
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