Redstone Academy: The Hopper Program

Piper Chen is the best redstone engineer she knows. Then she gets into the Hopper Program — two weeks, forty of the best young builders in the country, one scholarship — and finds out that "the best she knows" counts for nothing here. Marcus builds faster than she can think. Luna builds things that shouldn't work and somehow do. And Dr. Vasquez, the professor who runs the whole thing, asks the kind of questions that rearrange how you see a problem you thought you'd already solved. Every day is a new challenge: a working clock, a security system, an arcade game built inside the game. The bracket narrows. Kids get sent home. And Piper has to figure out that being smart and being genuinely good at something aren't the same thing — and that the second one takes creativity, collaboration, and the guts to fail in front of everyone. The redstone is real. Every contraption in the book works in actual Minecraft, so you can build them yourself. A competition story for kids who've stayed up all night perfecting an automatic farm and want a book that takes that seriously.