Title: Code Your Own Adventure (112 pages)
Author: Max Wainewright
Age Range: 9 – 12 years (+ or -)
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group – QEB
Book Description:
Major Kate, Pirate Pierre, Captain Maria, and Sir Percival need your help! Prepare for an exciting adventure that will see you saving Planet Zyskinar, searching for buried treasure, finding the Lost City of Gold, and discovering the Book of Spells.
From drawing simple shapes, to building games, Code Your Own Adventure introduces essential coding concepts. Using the beginners’ coding language, Scratch, simple and practical tasks are explained using easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions. Bring a space, pirate, jungle, and knight adventure to life through drawing central characters and shapes, animating plot lines, and creating games.
My Thoughts:
Code Your Own Adventure: A fun book to introduce kids (and even adults!) to STEM, animation, and showing coding can be fun!
What I loved:
Having an engineering background myself, I always appreciate books that can instill an interest in STEM. Books like these are a fun approach to STEM using storybuilding and clear step-by-step instructions to work on coding. This also gives young readers an insight into how animated (and even regular ones with CGI) movies and video games are made. I love that this book includes diverse characters and adventures across diverse locales. The illustrations are bright and eye-catching. The resource needed for learning and working on the coding adventures in this book is free and available from MIT – Scratch.
I have to mention here that I worked on all the coding exercises in the book, and had a blast doing them! While some of the instructions followed somehow ended up a bit off for me, it was still a learning experience and I made tweaks at that point to see what would correct it or simply to see what else can happen 🙂 So with kids working on the projects here, if things don’t seem to work exactly the way they say, just have the kids tweak it and they will have fun!
On the other hand:
I felt that it could use just a bit more of a story-line to make it even more fun for the target audience. And while this is a more specific issue, the story-line in the first story here was a bit confusing and I found myself lost after a bit so I ended up focusing on the coding part of it. Two more additions that I feel are needed to help a more general, non-coding-background audience (as might be for the target audience) – a glossary that helps the reader understand more of what is in the book, and a helpful index of what is beyond.
One additional note – there are more books in this series that you can check out!
So Should You Read This Book?
This is a worth-it addition to instill the love for coding and showing it can be fun.
Rating: B
Reading Level: 9 – 12 years (and other age groups too who are interested in learning and new to Scratch)
Reread Level: As needed
Disclaimer: This review is for an eARC of this ebook from Quarto Publishing Group-QEB and NetGalley. Opinions are fully mine.
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Add-ons for this:
This STEM box below sounds like a perfect match 🙂 The Superpower Academy box that includes hands-on projects to make. Stories and play empower kids with skills needed for success.
You can also check out more wonderful STEM Subscription Boxes from CrateJoy to continue exploring all the joys of STEM!
Writing this post as a series for the Ultimate Blog Challenge and Write 31 Days. 31 Days, 31 Books! This is for Day Eight (a little late!).
I had heard that the ‘Tute develop such a series. Thanks for reminding me.
🙂 sure, and I am going to check out the other books in this series as well to find out what learning they are making fun