Paths & Portals: 08/23/18

Paths & Portals by Gene Luen Yang is the second of the Secret Coders graphic novel series. Hopper, Eni, and Josh have found an underground classroom and the secret origins of present day Stately Academy. They've learned the tragic backstory of the groundskeeper and have agreed to be his students.

Meanwhile Principle Dean has enlisted the aid of the rugby team to find out what secrets Hopper, et al. have discovered. They are big, mean, and look like they can't be stopped.

Mixed in with this are further lessons on coding logo. The turtle robots are literal representations of the turtle that takes commands and echoes them to the screen. Logo was the first thing I actually loved to do on the computer back in seventh grade after two mind boggling years of "programming" Basic in the library (which meant typing exactly what the teacher read out loud to us to see what it did). There wasn't any sort of motivating factor to get us inspired to learn beyond whatever we happened to glean from following commands.

Anyway, this is a fun take on a beginning programming language, one that gives these kids access to secrets and control over many different sizes of robots.

The third book is Secrets & Sequences.

Four stars

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