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.