Chapter 1: Circuits and Curiosity

Chapter 1: Circuits and Curiosity

Intro:

In a quiet suburb of Manchester, England, a boy named Ethan Bell took apart his mother’s toaster just to see how it worked. That same curiosity would one day lead him into the world of computers—and eventually, to building something that would change lives.

Story:

Ethan had always been the “why” child. “Why does the kettle whistle?” “Why do phones light up when we touch them?” His parents, both schoolteachers, encouraged his questions—even when they didn’t have answers.

On his ninth birthday, Ethan’s uncle gifted him a used laptop, old and missing a few keys. But to Ethan, it was a treasure chest. He spent hours exploring its contents, accidentally deleting files, and learning how to recover them again. When he discovered Scratch, a coding platform for kids, it felt like unlocking a superpower. He built a simple game where a cat dodged falling apples. It wasn’t perfect, but when it ran smoothly, he jumped with joy.

Soon, he was researching logic gates, programming languages, and legends like Alan Turing. While most kids his age were trading football stickers, Ethan was trading lines of code. He read library books on programming, browsed forums, and asked his teachers for extra maths problems just for fun.

When a new student named Ryan joined their class, he mocked Ethan’s obsession. “You’ll never do anything real with that computer junk,” he said one day during lunch. Ethan didn’t retaliate. He just smiled and replied, “Watch me.”

One day, the school computer lab suffered a complete system crash. While teachers scrambled for tech support, Ethan asked to help. In under thirty minutes, he located a faulty driver issue and restored the system. The headteacher was so impressed, she asked him to help maintain the lab systems during free periods.

Outro:

That evening, Ethan sat at his desk, designing an app idea to help students organize homework. “This isn’t just a machine,” he thought. “It’s a doorway—to everywhere.