It rained that weekend, so it wasn’t dog-walking weather. Lucy had a feeling even Nixie wouldn’t find it fun to pick up extra-large dog poop in the rain.
But a rainy Saturday was perfect weather for coding.
First Elena had her hour of computer time and then she lay on the family room couch lost in a book.
So, boldly, Lucy sat down at the computer, set the timer for her own hour, called up the same computer website they used at camp, and clicked on the maze program. It was thrilling to send her boat sailing along merrily through even harder mazes, all by herself, without Preston or Pippa, without Nolan—just Lucy.
Half an hour later, Lucy heard Elena set her book down on the coffee table. She turned around to see Elena staring her way.
“What are you doing?” Elena asked, in an accusing tone.
What did Elena think she was doing?
“Coding,” Lucy said, as if she did coding all the time, as if she had just as much right to use the computer as Elena did—and didn’t she?
“Great!” Elena snapped. “You and I only have one computer for homework and coding and everything. So now I’m going to have to wait around all the time for my turn until your turn is done?”
Well, Lucy had been the one who had done all the waiting around so far.
“You already had your hour,” Lucy made herself say.
“But now I need the computer for homework,” Elena shot back.
Lucy looked at the timer. “I’ll be done in twenty-eight minutes.” Though she had just used up two minutes arguing with Elena.
Elena snatched up her book and stomped upstairs. Lucy could hear the door of their bedroom slam behind her.
There were still twenty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds left on the timer. But it was hard to steer a boat through a maze when the sound of the slammed door was ringing in Lucy’s ears.
Week two of coding camp began with a presentation from a guest speaker who used coding to make special light and sound effects for a local dance company. She looked exactly the way Lucy expected a dancer to look: tall and slim, with her hair pulled back tightly from her face in a non-messy bun. The video she showed was amazing. Lucy hadn’t known coding could be used for real-life dances by human beings, not just animated dances by cartoon creatures.
After the presentation, Preston said this would be the week for dance choreography. Choreography meant telling dancers the sequence of steps and movements to perform.
This would be the week Lucy learned how to make her own dances for her own hipping-hopping kangaroo!
“Let’s code a dance right now, in our room,” Pippa said. She and Preston liked what they called “unplugged” activities, where you learned about coding without even using a computer. Lucy thought those activities were fun, too.
Pippa turned on some music with a catchy beat, at a volume low enough that she could speak over it.
“First, let’s make a list of possible moves to include in our dance.”
What would count as a dance move? Lucy tried to remember what steps Elena’s kangaroo and hedgehog had done, but she didn’t know the names of any of them.
The other kids seemed baffled, too, even Nolan. So Pippa demonstrated a few: a clap high, a dab, a floss, and a funny one called Gangnam.
“Now let’s put them in an algorithm,” Pippa said. “Let’s decide which order to do them in—and how long to do each one. Two measures? Four measures? Six?”
Pippa counted out the beats of the music. “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.” She explained that each “one two three four” was a measure, and that she’d just counted out three measures.
After ten more minutes of demonstration, Pippa had the sequence of dance motions written on the classroom Smart Board with the number of measures, chosen by the campers, next to each one.
“And we’ll just keep on following this choreography code, in a loop, till the music ends. Get it?” Pippa asked.
Everyone nodded.
Pippa cranked up the volume on the music. “So now let’s dance it!”
Lucy tried doing the dance, following Pippa’s example, but the movements changed too quickly. One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four went by so fast when you were trying to do a clap high while it happened. Dancing clearly wasn’t going to turn out to be her best thing. It was more fun just to watch everyone else.
Nolan was good at remembering the motions for each dance move. But the serious expression on his face was such a contrast to the silliness of the motions, it made Lucy want to laugh.
Vera worked so hard to get every step perfect that she was still trying to do the dab when the rest of the campers were on to the floss.
Nixie looked pleased with herself even when she got the motions wrong. She gave huge smiles to an imaginary audience as if she were dancing in a show on Broadway.
As Boogie tried to keep up with the music’s pulsing beat, he flung out his arm for the double-down so energetically he narrowly missed smacking Vera in the face.
“Sorry!” he panted.
Then when he tried to do the Gangnam move, he stumbled against the side of a desk.
“Ow!” He stopped to rub his hip.
The song finally came to a stop, and Pippa clicked off the music.
“Well?” she said. “What did you think of our dance?”
“Dancing is hard!” one kid from another group moaned. Lucy certainly agreed.
“What made it hard?” Pippa asked him.
“Um—everything?”
“The desk crashed into me!” Boogie said, and got a big laugh, but not from Vera.
“So,” Pippa said, “one thing that made it hard was not having enough space to do your motions, so you bumped into each other and the furniture. What else made it hard?”
“It all went too fast,” someone in the front of the room said.
“So…maybe the dance moves should change after six or eight measures, not two or four,” Pippa suggested. “Anything else?”
“It’s too hot in here!” came another complaint.
Pippa smiled. “Well, that’s something we won’t have to worry about in our computer-coded choreography. Our animated dancers don’t sweat! But once we start coding for several animated dancers, we’ll have to watch for how we position them on the screen so they aren’t so close they’ll bump into each other. And we’ll have to make a sequence of the steps so the dance isn’t too frenetic and jerky—unless that’s the look you want, of course. It’s up to you.”
“And don’t let Boogie be one of the dancers!” Nixie joked, but not loud enough for Pippa and Preston to hear.
Boogie made a low bow, as if she had complimented him, and then caught himself just before he toppled over. Vera didn’t smile this time, either.
Boogie and Vera were just so different, Lucy thought. Boogie’s thing was goofing off and being silly; Vera’s thing was working hard and being serious. And right now it didn’t seem like coding was Vera’s thing or Boogie’s thing. But Boogie didn’t seem to mind if something wasn’t his thing, and Vera did—even if she already had two other things, comics and piano.
Right now Lucy still didn’t have anything to be her thing at all.
Coding a dance was even more fun than coding a boat in a maze. There were so many choices to make: picking the dancer, the music, the moves, even special background effects. And that was just for a dance with one dancer. When you added more dancers, they could be side by side, or in a square or in a circle. They could be the same size or different sizes, so that one was the main dancer in front, and the others danced behind her. They could be doing the same motions in unison, or each dancer could be doing a different motion. It depended on what instructions you put in the code.
Lucy chose a duck, to have something different from Elena’s kangaroo, and the disco song her dad liked to play when he washed the car, and a disco-ball background with bursts of bright light.
Yay for a disco-dancing duck!
Nolan already had his giraffe flanked by two smaller monkey backup dancers. Nixie had chosen a dog as her dancer—surprise, surprise—but was still trying to decide which music a dog would like best.
Vera would code one movement for one measure for her dancing mouse, and then run the program to see how it looked. Then she’d add another motion for another measure, and run the program to see how it looked. At the rate she was going, it would take her a whole month to get through one single mouse dance.
Boogie’s hippo was as clumsy a dancer as Boogie had been. His hippo was dancing right on top of his dancing turtle.
“Ouch!” Boogie said, on behalf of his turtle. “Get off me, you great big hippo!”
Lucy laughed, and this time Vera laughed with her. It was hard not to laugh with Boogie.
But Lucy was glad her duck was such a good dancer.
“I know you’re saving each program you code,” Preston said. “But now is a good time for a reminder to keep on doing this. Our last day of camp is going to be our Coding Expo, when your family and friends can come see the amazing things you’ve coded during our time together. They’re going to want to see some of these dances, for sure!”
Lucy remembered she hadn’t gone to the Coding Expo for Elena’s coding camp because she had been home sick with a bad cold that day.
Would Elena come to hers?
If she did, what would she think of Lucy’s dancing duck?
Would she be mad that Lucy’s duck danced just as well as Elena’s kangaroo?
What if her duck danced…even better?