In this Code.org challenge, Eon controls a squirrel named Scrat, and Scrat is hungry. The goal of every puzzle is the same: get Scrat across the grid to his acorn. But Scrat can't just run there — Eon has to program him by snapping direction blocks together and pressing run. "I think it's pretty similar to Scratch," Eon says, and he's right: a program is just a list of instructions, in order, that the computer follows one at a time.
Two questions before every move
Eon's dad turns each puzzle into the same little routine. First: which direction? Scrat can go up or down, left or right. In the very first puzzle the acorn is off to the side, so they talk it through — "left or right? This is the right." Then they swap in the game's real words: east, west, north, and south. Going right is east, so the block becomes when run, go east.
Second question: how many squares? This is the part it's easy to forget. On one puzzle Eon counts the gap between Scrat and his food out loud — "one block, two block" — and discovers Scrat needs to move two squares right. So the answer isn't a single go east block; it's two of them stacked together. Pick the direction, count the squares, add exactly that many blocks. Too few and Scrat stops short of the acorn.
When one direction isn't enough
The puzzles get trickier when the acorn isn't in a straight line. Now Scrat has to turn corners, so a program needs more than one direction. Eon works out that he has to go east, east, and then north to reach a goal that's up and to the right. When he runs an early attempt that only goes east, Scrat ends up in the wrong spot — "if you're wrong, you will go east and east, still not right." That's the whole point his dad makes: you run the code, watch what Scrat actually does, and if it doesn't reach the goal you add more blocks or change them. Getting it wrong on the first run isn't failing — it's information. "You try things out. You won't break it."
The tricky puzzle: delete, don't add
Then comes the puzzle Eon's dad clearly loved setting up. This time the game hands Eon some starter code already filled in — and it's wrong. The blocks read go east, go east, go south, go south, go east, go east, go south — way more moves than Scrat needs. "That's already too much," his dad points out. "So you should delete some of the code."
This flips the usual instinct. Up to now, every fix meant adding a block. Here the fix is to remove blocks until only the moves Scrat truly needs are left. Eon trims it down to just go east, go east — and Scrat lands right on the acorn. "Exactly! Yeah!" His dad spells out the lesson: "This is a tricky question. They add more code, more instructions to our code, so we can delete the code." A good debugger doesn't only know what to add — they know what to take away.
The final puzzle, all by himself
Puzzle six is the last one, and this time the game gives Eon no starter code at all. "Try this all by yourself," his dad says. Eon has to think through the whole path: Scrat needs to go left, which in compass words is west. He counts the squares — one, two — and adds two west blocks, runs it, and finishes the final puzzle. "You finished all the final puzzles. You finish everything." Going from following a routine to building the whole program from a blank screen is exactly what learning to code feels like.
Try it
Draw a small grid on paper. Put Scrat in one square and an acorn two squares up and one square to the right. Write the program as a list of direction blocks (remember: up is north, right is east). Then try the "tricky" version: write a program with one or two extra blocks, and challenge someone to fix it by deleting the wrong moves instead of adding new ones.