Have you ever made your brother do word search competitions?  Yeah, that was me.  Did you insist on reading books on the bus ride to school even though you had serious motion sickness?  Stupid, right?  So me.  Forget Nintendo!  I read books by the dying light of the summer sun until it was too dark to see.

I’ve always been a word girl.  And now, as an adult, I cannot go a day without reading at least a few pages of a book or writing a few paragraphs of a new project.  Ask my husband and my kids.  I become very cranky.

If you ask me to do anything with math (other than geometry—I totally rock at geometry proofs!) or any of the sciences, I could get to a high school level and that’s about it.  The only C I ever got in my entire life was in calculus 1 in college.  Twenty years later, thinking about that class still makes me cringe.

Given my history, you can understand why I was somewhat bemused this past spring when I found myself writing a STEM-focused chapter book.  (For my mom, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)

My seven year old son is always creating contraptions, and when I searched the library for books at his reading level that focused on building and creating, I found very few.  Most were either too old for him (middle grade) or too simple for him (picture books and introductory chapter books).  I found one series, the Ada Lace mysteries, that was ideal, but the protagonist is a girl.  I am all for STEM books that have girl protagonists (I bought the first Ada Lace book for my daughter when she gets older), but my son is beginning to figure out that girl things are not cool for first grade boys, despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise.

Well, shoot, I thought.  I can fix this.  So I wrote a book to fill the gap.  It’s called The Three Engineers: Dog of Doom.  I can tell that my son enjoyed reading all of my drafts because I went to my desk a half dozen times to find pages strewn everywhere.  “What happened?” I asked.  “I read your story,” he replied.  Enough said.

I thought that writing a STEM book was a stretch, and then my friend asked me if I could write a story for her Girls Who Code Class.

What?!

That was my first reaction.  I think I actually said that…out loud…to my friend’s face.

I know absolutely nothing about computer coding.  Zip.  Zero.  Computers are like math for me; I appreciate their utility, but I don’t understand them.  Ergo, I avoid them completely.

How am I supposed to write a story for girls to code when I know nothing about how coding works?

After a very long conversation over a very tasty lunch in a Mexican restaurant with a very distracting talking moose head on the wall (“Bear down, Chicago Bears!” it sang after Every. Single. Good. Play.), I finally said, “Ok.  I can do this!  Maybe.  I think?”

I did some research and visited coding websites for kids to try and understand what was possible, and I eventually wrote a story.  It’s simple, but it will allow the girls to work within a framework while still having the freedom to make the story their own.

Life has been good this fall.  Crazy unpredictable, but good.  From a girl who loved words to a writer who pens STEM stories and scaffolding for coders.  It’s still so strange to me.  I guess sometimes the doors just open and you walk right through.