Maxine, known to her friends and family as Max, is just your average seventh-grader. Her friends are loyal, if a little bit weird. Her teachers are okay. Her parents love her, even if they do put a little too much pressure on her to perform well on the weekly UpGrade Assesments at school. She’s fascinated by robotics. Really, she’s just a normal student, at a normal middle school.
That is, if “normal” is a school run by a supercomputer named Barbara.
Vanguard Middle School is the school of the future. A test program put in place by the Federal School Board called Constant UpGrade. Everything about the school is about moving upward, riding the wave of technology. The janitors, lunchroom staff, and librarians are robots. Every classroom, hallway, door, and even student is monitored by cameras. Even the students themselves are UpGrading, through weekly assessments that determine that they are meeting academic goals. While there is a living-and-breathing principal, Mr. Dorgas, everybody knows it’s Vice Principal Barbara who’s in charge. Sound crazy? It appears to be working. Vanguard is one of the best middle schools in Florida—high test scores, few discipline problems, and less expensive to operate than those older traditional school models.
And now, even bigger news. Vanguard has been selected to participate in the Robot Integration Program, and nobody is more excited than Max. The very first robot student! And rumor has it, it’s not just some other robot controlled by Barbara, but a free-thinking robot, one with cutting edge artificial intelligence that will allow him to think, and feel, and learn like any other student. Max has high hopes. But when she first meets Fuzzy in the hallway, she’s disappointed. The robot is short, dressed in clothes years out of style, and its face is kinda creepy under a dark wig. And then it falls over. Right at Max’s feet.
Thus begins the friendship between Max and Fuzzy. After Fuzzy is whisked away for repairs, Max is sure she’ll never get that close to the robot again. But the team behind Fuzzy’s creation selects Max as a guide, a sort of friend and teacher to navigate Fuzzy through the physical and emotional hurdles of the average middle school student. The idea is that Max will give Fuzzy the experiences he needs to build his own intelligence. What actually happens is much more. The two form a friendship that seems to defy human-to-robot boundaries. When Max begins getting more and more discipline tags, and failing her UpGrade assesments, even though she’s positive she knows the information, Fuzzy investigates and discovers that he may not be the only super-robot with plans of his own. And when Fuzzy’s investigating gets him into some serious trouble, it’s Max and her friends who come to his rescue.
In Fuzzy, authors Tom Angleberger and Paul Dellinger take a not-so-far-fetched look at the schools of the future. With an ever-expanding world of technology at our fingertips, is a school run by super computers that strange of an idea? Is student progress monitored by weekly assessments with results sent straight to parents outrageous? Is a relationship between a human and a robot inconceivable? But all that technology comes with a risk, as we discover in Fuzzy. The lines between science fiction and reality are blurred, the important questions raised, and the Pandora’s box opened as we follow Max and Fuzzy through the halls of Vanguard Middle School. But one thing is for certain: This book takes readers on a ride that’s smart, thought-provoking, and funny. Curious young readers who love to question will devour it, as will science-fiction fans.