How to Code a Sandcastle
Solid coding lessons fill fun tale of girl and her robot.
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A Lot or a Little?
The parents' guide to what's in this book.
What Parents Need to Know
父母需要知道How to Code a Sandcastleis by Josh Funk, a professional software engineer who also writes kids' books, and illustrated bySara Palacios. The book's a collaboration with the nonprofit organization Girls Who Code, and opens with a note from the founder, cheering on the idea of familiarizing kids at any early age with basic coding concepts, the way you'd introduce "animals, history, and space." It uses a real-world application -- building a sandcastle -- to introduce the coding steps sequence, loop, and if-then-else, showing how to break the task into its component parts. The book works for all kids, but since the main character's a girl who's African American, it definitely welcomes girls and kids of color to the coding party.
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What's the Story?
In HOW TO CODE A SANDCASTLE, it's the last day of summer vacation, and Pearl's sandcastles keep getting destroyed -- by waves, by Frisbees, by dogs. So she decides to enlist the help of her robot friend, Pascal. "He’ll do whatever I tell him -- as long as I tell him in CODE. It’s not secret code -- it’s special instructions that computers understand." Pearl sequences the task, breaking the big problem into smaller ones, some of which she instructs him to repeat in a loop. Pascal doesn't always understand the instructions; when she sends him out to get decorations, he comes back with a baby's binky. So she creates if-then-else code that specifies the steps more clearly. At the end, they create a moat to protect the sandcastle, and use a loop code to create a whole kingdom.
Is It Any Good?
This sunny book delivers lots of fun along with its serious computer lesson: Coding's a day at the beach if you use it to build a sandcastle.How to Code a Sandcastlesuccessfully introduces basic concepts by using coding language to demonstrate how to break a simple task into its component parts, which is a good life skill as well as a computer skill. Author Josh Funk includes plenty of humor. The main character's not daunted when a "flying saucer" (Frisbee) knocks over her castle, or when it gets an unintended moat (via dog pee). But the lessons aren't just breezy, they're solid, and the pages at the end explain the coding concepts of sequence, loop, and if-then-else more fully.
插画家Sara帕拉西奥斯确保群众this beach is racially diverse, with lots of African American beachgoers, and families that are racially mixed. Pearl, the narrator, is way cute in her heart sunglasses and springy pigtails, and Palacios cleverly works in illustrations of people absorbed in beach reading, with one newspaper sporting a propos headlines -- "Programmer fixes bug!" and "Memory leak disaster!" -- and a magazine with a photo of an African American subject. The lesson goes down as easily as a refreshing ice pop on a hot beach day, and it's just as welcome.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the coding concepts inHow to Code a Sandcastle. Do you understand sequence, loop, and if-then-else? Did the story make them clear? Did the explanation at the end help you understand?
Are there other times in life when you've had to break down a big task into a little one either to understand it or to accomplish it? How did you do that? Are there tasks you do over and over that it would be helpful to "loop?"
If you had a robot, what other fun tasks would you break down using these coding concepts? Try making your own story and instructions.
Book Details
- Author:Josh Funk
- Illustrator:Sara Palacios
- Genre:Picture Book
- Topics:STEM,Great Girl Role Models,Robots,Science and Nature
- Book type: Fiction
- Publisher:Viking Books for Young Readers
- Publication date: May 15, 2018
- Publisher's recommended age(s): 4 - 8
- Number of pages: 44
- Available on: Nook, Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
- Last updated: April 29, 2018
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