One Recipe
On Tuesday evenings, the Fairview Public Library in Ohio opens a small room at the back for the coding club. Everyone in the club is over sixty. The teacher is nineteen. The club is free, and nobody there wants a job in technology.
The first class was in October. A few people came early. Amir sat by the window with his coat still on.
The teacher wrote one line on the white board: What do you want to build? Then she told them to focus on one small thing, not a big one.
The answers came slowly.
A retired nurse wanted an app for her pills, because she forgot them on busy days.
A man in a blue coat wanted an app with only three buttons: his son, his daughter, and his doctor.
A woman wanted a map of the old paper factory, with the name of every worker on it. The factory closed in 1998.
Amir wanted a recipe app. Only one recipe. His wife made a lemon cake every winter, and he still had the card in his pocket, in her writing.
The teacher was direct. “That’s the easiest one,” she said. “We can build it tonight.”
They built it in forty minutes. It wasn’t creative, and it wasn’t fancy. It was a white screen with one lemon cake on it, and under the cake, six lines in his wife’s words.
Amir opened it twice on the bus home.