A design & engineering brief · 05
Sonny & Ro
the ice cream parlour
Coding classes for kids usually start with syntax. But the useful part, the way programmers think, doesn't need a computer at all. So Sonya and I wrote a story instead: two kids open an ice cream parlour, and every problem they hit is one a programmer would recognize: big wishes broken into steps, patterns, trying again when something breaks.
Read it, live
Click through and turn the pages. It's the real interactive edition.
open the real thing ↗
Design notes
- The story comes first. Kids solve the parlour's problems long before anyone uses the word 'algorithm'.
- Co-written with Sonya Kotov. We drafted it in 2017 and picked it back up because the message suddenly mattered more.
- Meant to be read aloud, with puzzles you point at together.
Engineering notes
- The digital edition keeps the book's pages and adds gentle interactions.
- Every puzzle maps to a real computing idea: decomposition, patterns, loops, debugging.
- Built to work on whatever device a family already has.