Ruth Price-Mohr

Miss Lovelace's code gets an upgrade Ruth Price-Mohr

New research has demonstrated that a simple text manipulation can reduce the phenomenon known as migration (letters or words seeming to move) and lead to improved comprehension when reading narrative text for students with delayed-visual-disengagement dyslexia. When students read aloud from this adjusted text, compared to normal text, they made fewer mispronunciations, fewer omissions, fewer substitutions and fewer migrations and thus scored higher on standardised tests of comprehension. Crossbridge Books is the first publisher to publish books using this adjusted text. Miss Lovelace's code gets an upgrade (dyslexia-friendly edition) is the third title to be published in this format. The humorous content is suitable for children aged 7-11 and particular appealing to boys who are often those who struggle to learn to read with conventional text. The story tells about the children, who were introduced in the second book, who meet up with another girl while on holiday together. They discover a wicked plot by the owner of the holiday park that will destroy the local ecology and they make a plan to foil the eco-criminal's plot. When the children discover that Miss Lovelace's code has new function, they use this to carry out their cunning plan and are hailed as eco-warriors in the local newspaper. The goodies win and the baddies get their just deserts. In the first two books, each chapter was a standalone episode, but in this book the chapters are more like a traditional chapter book with each chapter being part of one adventure. The code that is the focus of these stories is object -oriented code using Java based on the WeeBee Code for primary or elementary school children. Although the stories are obviously science fiction, the language used in the code phrases will support children's understanding of the computational principles of object-oriented code.