Agent Asha: Mission Shark Bytes

"I actually love the fact that we got some novels. That’s a new trend. I know that in last year’s Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize there was a novel in the top six, that was also about a girl doing coding. I gave that one to a 12-year-old friend of mine, who was just starting a coding class in school. Her mother said that she read it in one sitting, she was just really excited. I liked it because I think that storytelling is a very human way of communicating. It can be a really effective way to engage the reader in science. Storytelling is something that I think we as scientists haven’t used to the extent that we could. I don’t know about you, but there was that little secret message in Morse code at the beginning of each chapter. I was actually decoding it as I went along, reminding me of my Morse code. The protagonist is a girl and is Asian, non-white, so the book also provides an interesting role model without it being obvious. Yes. And I love the fact that a lot of it is very here and now but it’s also a little bit futuristic. So it spans that range nicely; I’ve never been a big sci-fi person but the slightly futuristic is nice. Definitely critical thinking, and also about algorithms and debugging and all these very fundamental computing skills."