“Allie’s in G4G?” he asked.
“Yep. I added her last weekend. Wait until you see her game, Nathan. It’s extraordinary.” And then she turned to Allie. “And the game Nathan’s been working on all summer is going to blow your mind!” She drummed her hands on her desk excitedly.
Allie didn’t say a word.
Nathan didn’t say anything, either.
They were both trying as hard as they could not to look at each other.
“Now, as your mentor,” she said, “it’s my job to help you get ready for Saturday in every way I can. Your games are solid at this point, so the best thing I can do is to prepare you to wow those judges. And I had an idea on my way to school this morning! What do you think about demonstrating your apps to your classmates today?”
Allie didn’t say a word. Neither did Nathan.
Ms. Slade batted at her dangly earrings, showing off her yellow strong-arm emojis. “Remember these? They’re my first-day-of-school earrings. They’re supposed to remind you to be brave and strong when you walk in these doors every day for the next ten months.”
Allie didn’t feel brave or strong. She felt nervous. Her palms were getting clammy, so she rubbed them against her jeans. “I would, but I don’t have the voting app.”
“You can improvise, can’t you?” Ms. Slade asked.
“I guess. But I…just…” Allie heard herself stammering. “I just didn’t plan to show it to anyone other than my three best friends until after the competition.”
Nathan looked over and raised an eyebrow, silently questioning her, and Allie suddenly felt defensive. She glared back at him. “Not because the code isn’t solid, Nathan. It is. It’s rock solid.”
“I’m sure it is,” Nathan said with a shrug. But he didn’t sound like he meant it.
Allie ignored him. “It’s solid,” she told Ms. Slade. “It’s just that the competition is only five days away and I don’t want to jinx anything, that’s all.”
Ms. Slade smiled at her. “I totally get it, but it’s only a demo. You’re not inviting your whole advanced computer science class to download it or anything.”
Allie nodded. She knew Ms. Slade was right. But still, the idea of showing Click’d to her classmates made her ridiculously nervous; even more nervous than she was onstage back at CodeGirls camp.
Nathan combed his hand through his hair. “Well, I don’t know about her, but I’m ready to go.”
Allie squared her shoulders and looked right at him. “So am I,” she said, faking confidence more than feeling it.
“Great!” Ms. Slade clapped her hands together once. “I’ll do my usual first-day-of-school thing and then turn the show over to you two. Who wants to go first?”
“I’ll go,” they both said at the same time.
Ms. Slade reached into her drawer and pulled out a quarter. “Heads, Allie goes first. Tails, Nathan goes first.” She flipped it in the air and it landed with a thunk, spinning in small circles on her desk before it settled on tails. “Looks like you’re up first, Nathan.”
Nathan shot Allie a smug look and Allie glared at him.
When she turned to take a seat at her station, someone else was already sitting there, and Allie had to take the only desk that was still unclaimed. It was in the first row, right in front of Ms. Slade, and nowhere near the window. She couldn’t help but blame Nathan for that, too.
The bell rang. Ms. Slade stood silently at the front of the room, waiting for the chatter to stop. Eventually, when the room was quiet, she began speaking.
“Welcome back, everyone!” she said. “Did you all have an incredible summer?” Some people slouched lower in their seats, while others sat up a little taller. “I want to hear all about it. Who wants to start?”
A few hands shot up, and Ms. Slade spent the next ten minutes going around the room. Brandon told the class about his trip to Hawaii, Kari talked about spending most days at the skate park, and Justin talked about all the books he’d read. And when everyone was done, Ms. Slade told everyone how she spent two weeks in India visiting family and attending her favorite cousin’s wedding. She invited everyone to come into the lab during lunch that week if they wanted to see her pictures.
Allie was only half listening. She was thinking about her demo, visualizing how she’d do it without the voting app, and trying to ignore the butterflies that felt like they’d taken over her stomach.
Ms. Slade leaned back on the edge of her desk. “I’ll tell you about our new semester project, but first, I have some exciting news to share. Before I began teaching, I spent ten years as a developer at Spyglass Games. While I was there, I helped start the Games for Good competition, a contest exclusively for teen coders, and after I left the company, I stayed on as a mentor. Now each year, I get to bring one talented young developer into this contest. But this year, I convinced the judges to let me bring two students: Nathan Frederickson and Allie Navarro. As seventh graders, they’ll be the two youngest players to ever enter G4G. Today, they’re going to show you the games that got them there. Let’s give them a big hand.”
Everyone clapped as she waved Nathan to the front of the room. He paired his laptop with the giant monitor and a colorful icon of a house appeared in the center. A second later, two animated characters emerged from the sides of the screen, wearing overalls and shuffling toward the center carrying armfuls of letters. When they reached the house, the two characters threw the letters into the air. They looked up, watching them tumble around in the sky before settling on top of the house and forming the roof with the name BUILT.
“My Games for Good entry is a fun, interactive game where players work together to build homes—animated ones, and real ones, too.”
Nathan clicked on the icon, and suddenly there was a whole neighborhood, complete with streets, sidewalks, trees, and even a tiny playground off in the corner. Dotting the sidewalks were small, cartoonish-looking houses.
“The objective of the game is to build houses.” Nathan pointed to the screen, and Allie watched an animated woman in a blue sweatshirt and a white cap, standing on a ladder and hammering on the roof. “Each player starts off with some wood, basic tools, and a few supplies, like nails and plaster. But your original materials will only get you so far. When you run out, you have to buy more at the hardware store.” He pointed to a building on the corner. The little characters were running inside empty-handed and leaving with tools, boards, and cans of paint.
“You buy supplies using the points you earn, and you earn points by helping your neighbors.”
Nathan left-clicked on a character wearing a red sweatshirt and right-clicked on a house on the opposite side of the street. The little man climbed down from the ladder, tucked it under his arm, and carried it over to the target house. When he reached it, he propped the ladder against the side, climbed again, and began hammering next to another man wearing a blue sweatshirt.
Allie couldn’t get over the amount of detail in each character—different skin tones and hair colors, different clothes and hats. Aside from the way they moved across the screen, everything about them was designed to be unique.
She fixed her gaze on the tiny figure with a hammer in his hand and watched the house go up slowly, plank by plank. It started coming together faster once there were two characters working on it.
“Fun, right? But here’s where it becomes a game that also does good.” He zoomed out so the class could see the neighborhood from a bird’s-eye view. “It’s all about these signs.”
Allie hadn’t noticed them before, but now she saw the empty street signs and billboards scattered throughout the neighborhood.
“All the signs are reserved for corporate sponsors.” Nathan zoomed in on one and pointed at the logo. “I’m sure you all recognize this?”
Allie rolled her eyes. Of course they did. It was one of the most recognized logos on the Internet.
“Spyglass Games,” someone in the back yelled.
“That’s right. Spyglass isn’t an official Built sponsor
,” he said as he locked his eyes on Allie, “but when I win, they will be.”
Allie folded her arms across her chest. The class let out an “Oh!” and Allie heard someone say, “Burn!”
“Every time a player completes a house, one of the sponsors donates a dollar to Habitat for Humanity. Since I began developing this game, I’ve built more than a thousand of these little houses.” Nathan was wearing a huge smile now, waving his hands as he talked, and Allie could hear the excitement in his voice. “If I had just one sponsor, we would have raised one thousand dollars. Which would be great, but imagine if we had hundreds or thousands of players, and twenty or thirty big corporate sponsors, each taking turns to kick in a buck every time a player finished a house. That’s real money, going to a real cause.” He closed his laptop and the monitor went dark. “So that’s Built. A real-life game for good.”
Allie felt her mouth turn up at the corners. But then she remembered he was her competition and adjusted her expression.
As the room erupted into applause, Nathan bowed exaggeratedly and returned to his seat in the back of the room. He didn’t even look at Allie as he walked past her.
“Okay, Allie,” Ms. Slade said. “You’re up.”
Her hands started shaking and her heart started racing. She stepped to the spot in the front of the room and looked around at her classmates.
You got this, she thought. Don’t let Nathan intimidate you.
As she paired her phone with the wireless projection system, Ms. Slade told the class about the CodeGirls summer camp, and how Allie had been one of twenty middle school girls selected out of nearly a thousand applicants from across the country. Then Ms. Slade killed the lights.
Allie took a big breath. “Take a look around this room,” she said. “This is Advanced Computer Science. We’ve all been in class together for a year now. And we all know that every one of us has one thing in common: we love coding.
“But have you ever wondered what else we have in common?” She pointed to a girl in the front row. “Maybe Shonna and I both love reading. Maybe we even love the same books.” She pointed at two boys in the back row. “And maybe Jason and Theo both like horror movies.” She pointed at the door. “And what about the people out there?”
She interlaced her hands behind her back. “There are a little over nine hundred students here at Mercer Middle School. You’re never going to meet all of them. Not here. Not even when we all get to high school. But there is one person at Mercer who has more in common with you than anyone else.” She held up her finger. “One person. What if you graduate never knowing who that person is, simply because you never had a class together? What if you never meet simply because your paths never cross?”
Allie locked eyes with a few people in the room. They looked intrigued.
“What if I told you there was an app to help you find that person?”
Allie realized her hands were no longer trembling. She had the attention of everyone in the room and it felt good.
She tapped the icon on her phone and the Click’d logo appeared on the monitor behind her. She didn’t want to use her newest group since there were only four users, so she opened the CodeGirls group instead. Allie slid her finger down the screen and scrolled through their photos. Seeing their faces made her miss them all over again.
“You start by creating a profile,” she said. “For the sake of the demo, let’s make our class a person. What should we call ourselves?”
Her classmates looked at one another. Finally, Kylie Rodriguez shouted, “I’ve got it!” from the last row, and then pointed to the two computers in the back corner. “Agnes Ira.”
“Perfect!” Allie said, smiling as she typed in the name.
Agnes and Ira were the two most powerful computers in the lab, and Ms. Slade was especially proud of their names. Agnes was the computer that gave love advice in an episode of an old TV show called the Twilight Zone, and Ira was the computer used by Wonder Woman’s alias, Diana Prince. The two machines were used exclusively for special projects, and they weren’t on the school network or protected by the district firewall, so no one could get past the login screen without Ms. Slade’s permission.
Allie quickly typed in a bunch of fake profile data, took a picture of the whole class, and then moved on to the quiz questions. As the series of four pictures flashed on the screen behind her, Allie went around the room and gave each person a chance to answer. There were twenty-three students in the class, so she rounded the room twice and let Ms. Slade answer the last four questions.
Then Allie described the photo clues, and how Click’d worked on proximity to help you and your top ten friends find one another. She played the bloop sound. “This sound is unique to Click’d. Every time you hear it, it means one of the people on your leaderboard is within fifty feet of you. And your job is to track him or her down using the clues.”
Allie looked around the room. “Any questions?”
Benita Samuels raised her hand. “I’m just curious. This looks super fun, but how is it a game for good?”
Allie’s heart started racing again. She thought the good part of Click’d was so obvious. But after seeing Nathan’s game…maybe it wasn’t.
“I think the good will come from the stories it generates. My CodeGirls and I learned so much about one another, all because of Click’d. Sure, it’s not building houses for people in need, but people need friendship, too.” Benita nodded along with her.
Xander Pierce raised his hand and Allie called on him. “When can we play?”
She was about to say Next week, but then she thought about Benita’s question. If she was going to beat Nathan, she needed to show the judges that her game wasn’t only as well designed as his; she had to prove it was as inherently good as his. To do that, she needed real-life success stories. And lots of users. She remembered what Maddie said during lunch. Maybe she was right—there wasn’t a better week to share Click’d.
If everyone in that room joined and shared it with a few of their friends, she could have fifty or sixty—maybe even one hundred—users by Saturday. That would look good to the judges. And with all those users, she’d have at least two or three interesting friendship stories to share during her stage presentation.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she looked at Xander and said, “You can start playing right now.” She let her gaze travel around the room. “Anyone else want an invitation?”
Every hand in the room went up. Even Nathan’s.
Allie caught Ms. Slade’s expression. She could tell she was confused about her sudden change of heart, but she didn’t tell her to stop or anything, so Allie kept going.
The advanced computer science class worked together on projects all last year, so she already had all their names in her contacts. She returned to her desk, opened Click’d, and began checking the boxes next to their names. She pressed INVITE.
Ms. Slade returned to the front of the room. “Okay, guys, I’m glad you’re excited, but keep those phones off. We have work to do. You can start clicking after school.”
Clicking. Allie smiled. She liked the sound of that. A lot. Enough to overlook all the reasons she had been waiting to share it.
She hid her phone under her desk and typed a quick group text to Maddie, Zoe, and Emma:
Allie
changed my mind
invite everyone you know
let’s see what Click’d can do!
By the end of Advanced Computer Science, Click’d had sixteen new users. At the end of sixth, there were twenty-seven users. And more people joined throughout seventh period. Allie tried not to think about it, but it was impossible with all those strangers downloading her game and taking her quiz. Would they know how to read the clues? Would they know how to access the leaderboard?
By the time the final bell rang, there were thirty-two users. She left seventh period with a smile on her face. She couldn’t wait to get home and log into the CodeGirls server so she could see what was happening on
the back-end database.
Allie had barely taken ten steps when her phone let out a bloop-bloop.
She looked down. The screen was bright yellow, and Allie felt the adrenaline surge through her whole body. Someone was close!
She cut through the crowd bound for the bus, listening for sounds. And as soon as she turned the corner that led to the front of the school, her phone let out three bloops as it changed from yellow to red.
Allie stopped and looked down at the photo. She knew this girl, Claire. She sat behind her in photography class the year before, and she used to stare at her dark curly hair, envying the way it always seemed to fall in perfect ringlets. Allie could never get her curls to look like that. In the picture on her phone, Claire still had braces, but Allie remembered how excited she was when she got them taken off right before summer vacation.
Allie listened carefully. From across the grass, she heard the sound again.
She came up on her tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd, and spotted another phone high in the air. It was still at least thirty feet away, but it was moving toward her, and Allie could see the screen tinted red and flashing fast.
Her heart kicked into a whole new gear as she held her phone higher. She saw a hand waving to her, and she waved back as the two of them twisted through the crowd.
They were both smiling as they stopped in front of each other. Claire turned her phone so Allie could see the photo she’d taken with her dad on a hike a few months back. “I thought I knew you! We had photography class together last year,” she said as she brought her hand to her chest. “Claire Friedman.”
Allie already knew her name, and not just because they’d had a class together. Everyone knew Claire. She was an eighth grader. A super-popular eighth grader.
“Hi! Allie Navarro.”
Claire gave her phone a little shake. “I just installed this thing. I have no idea how it works, do you?”
Allie beamed. “Yeah. Now we tap our phones together.”
“Really?” Claire smiled even wider as she brought her phone to Allie’s. Their phones vibrated and the screens flashed white, and then their leaderboards appeared. Claire’s name and photo appeared in Allie’s #5 spot.