The Spark - 1

Four students find a machine in a school storeroom. It has one eye, a chalkboard where a face should be, and a switch on the back. They flip it. Nothing happens - and nothing goes on happening for eleven minutes.

To make it clever, they first have to work out what clever even means. Every answer they try falls apart in an interesting way.

The Spark is the first book of a five-part illustrated journey into artificial intelligence for readers aged 12 to 18. It teaches algorithms, sensing, memory, search and the feedback loop that changes everything - not by defining them, but by making you feel them first. The machine, Pip, never knows anything the reader has not just learned. That constraint is the whole point, and the series keeps it for five books.

Inside: ten chapters, each built the same way - a story scene that goes wrong, one big idea on one page, the concept unfolded in three steps, a hands-on activity, a true story from somewhere in the world, and a question the next chapter answers. Every chapter ends unresolved.

Every activity needs only paper, pencil and people. No computer, ever. And every one now includes a five-minute version for a reader working alone.

Written for the full grade 7-12 range, and for anybody older who never got a straight answer about how any of this works.

Everything it learns, you learn first.