Sonya's Teaching Blog

Reading Girl Code: Gaming, Going Viral and Getting It Done  was accidentally appropriate on my part, as May 11 was National  Girls Learning Code Day . This book was written by Sophie Houser and Andrea Gonzales and tells the true story of how they spent a summer learning to code with a  Girls Who Code  camp in New York City, created a game together as a final project, and experienced their game, Tampon Run , going viral and taking their lives by storm (the game was not working for me when I tried, but there is now a version for iOS included in the link). Girl Code  cover care of Goodreads . There were a lot of things I loved about this book. I love that it was a book written for teens, by teens. I loved that they speak so frankly about their experiences, including both the positive and the negative aspects of their experience. In addition to talking about coding, they discuss topics such as anxiety and impostor syndrome, trying to figure out what you want...

Cover of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas' Red: A Haida Manga . Image care of chapters.indigo.ca Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is often credited with the creation of the "Haida Manga" genre of graphica, and Red  is one of his most well-known works. It tells a classic Haida cautionary tale of pride and revenge in a very visual style. What's more, the pages of the book can be removed and put together to build a mural (though readers will need two copies of the book to do this properly). Mural made of pages from Red: A Haida Manga . Image care of Huffington Post . Yahgulanaas encourages readers to take the book apart for this purpose, and as much as it hurts me to take books apart, I think this is required to really appreciate the art of this book. When read in a linear fashion, some of the book feels out of order or like bits are missing. The extra connections made between pages complete the picture, and the story. And I think students would love the opportunity to ta...