Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang is the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of what's popularly known as the MacArthur "Genius" Grant. Welcome to Stately Academy, a school which is just crawling with mysteries to be solved! The founder of the school left many clues and puzzles to challenge his enterprising students. Using their wits and their growing prowess with coding, Hopper and her friend Eni are going to solve the mystery of Stately Academy no matter what it takes! From graphic novel superstar (and high school computer programming teacher) Gene Luen Yang comes a wildly entertaining new series that combines logic puzzles and basic programming instruction with a page-turning mystery plot!

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Sarah Sammis

Turtle graphics robot and binary eyed birds. And the lime jello green of Mike Holmes.


http://pussreboots.com/blog/2018/comm...

Nadine 

#GN #coding #STEAM 
Great, premise, fantastic illustrations ... BUT ...
Let me start with the good - This type of book is fantastic for a bunch of students I have who like graphic novels and who like books in which "things are done, and things are learnt" I can see that this will be just great for my "blokes with books" club, where we do communal reading and since each chapter ends on a question, they can go off and try and solve it collaboratively. Illustrations good - very green though.

What I didn't like though was that the book as a whole had no resolution and so was ultimately unsatisfying. I'm not against sequels or series, in fact they're fantastic for kids because if the first one hooks them they keep going and going and going. But the thing about a (good) series is that each book is a self contained whole with a whole story and, if necessary a cliff hanger to get you anticipating the next book. With this book you just got going into the story and it ended. And the next book in the series isn't even ready. If you're going to write like this - make sure you have at least 4 books up and running and ready to go because otherwise both the reader and the book itself loses momentum. Look at the popular "lunch lady" - each book is a contained whole, but each helps you learn more about the characters.

So while I'd like to give it a 4 or 5 star rating, it will have to be a 3 since you're not helping the situation here!

Secret Coders

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