By Gene Luen Yang
A new girl and a classmate at a creepy old academy figure out its secrets run on hidden code, and they crack them by learning to program.
Hopper is the new girl at Stately Academy, a gloomy old school with creepy statues, a grumpy janitor, and strange four-eyed birds watching from the trees. She and a boy named Eni notice that the birds are showing numbers in binary, and that the whole school seems to answer to hidden codes. The further they poke around, the more the place gives up. What makes it work is that the puzzles are real ones your child can stop and solve right alongside Hopper and Eni, starting with binary and moving into commands that steer a little drawing robot. It's the first book in a six-book series.
For a computer-obsessed child who'd rather look at pictures than paragraphs, this one pulls off a real trick: a mystery-adventure that teaches genuine programming logic without ever feeling like a lesson. The graphic-novel format keeps a reluctant reader moving, and the puzzles give a child who likes to solve things something real to do. The spooky setting is what makes it read like a story instead of a workbook. I'd hand this to a child who thinks coding sounds boring before any straight coding book.