I don’t normally review fiction on my blog, but Click’d ties in beautifully with makerspaces and would be a fantastic addition to your library. Here’s why:
Read this Book: Click’d
Allie Navarro loves to code. She also loves soccer and hanging out with her friends. Over the summer, she gets to go a coding camp with other girls from throughout the country. There, she creates Click’d, an app that lets you take a personality quiz and then leads you on a sort of digital scavenger hunt to find friends with similar interests that you can “click” with. Allie can’t believe it when she gets selected to present her app at Games for Good, an app development competition. But when the whole school starts downloading her app, glitches begin to crop up, and Allie isn’t sure if she can fix it in time…
Coding, Apps, Makerspaces and Grit
There are so many things I love about this upper elementary/middle grade novel. The most obvious are the ties to makerspaces. Allie is a girl who loves to code. She has conversations with her teachers and fellow coders that introduce terms and concepts from coding without it feeling too much like an instruction manual. You don’t need any coding experience to enjoy this book – but it certainly might make you want to try. Allie experiences failure, perseverance, and resilience. She learns valuable lessons about friendship along the way. And also, her computer science teacher 3D prints her own earrings 🙂
(To be clear, this isn’t a novel that teaches you coding. Coding is simply a central element of the plot)
A Balanced Middle-Grade Role Model
And there are other elements that just make this a great middle school read over all. Allie is into coding and sets a great role model for girls. But she’s also balanced. She loves hanging out with her friends, taking selfies and playing soccer. She cares about other people. And also, I love that there isn’t some background plot about trying to get the attention of a guy. There is a guy friend, but there’s never anything romantic. One of Allie’s friends is trying to talk to her crush, but that’s as far as it goes. I love that this book shows girls that it’s okay to NOT be boy-crazy in middle school and avoids that heteronormative trope that shows up in so many middle grade novels. It focuses more on friendship and personal development.
Check out Click’d
If you have an elementary or middle school makerspace, I highly recommend getting a copy of Click’d to add to your library. It’s great for any student interested in coding and would be fantastic for a book discussion on failure and grit.
What are your favorite middle-grade novels with Makerspace tie-ins and themes?
Want to see what other books I’ve reviewed? Check them out here.