After Christmas, Greg creates a game where Rowley rides the Big Wheel down a hill, and Greg tries to knock him off by throwing a football. Rowley asks to switch places, but Greg refuses, stating that “[t]hat thing was hitting thirty-five miles an hour, and it didn’t have any brakes” (137). One day, Greg successfully hits Rowley, and Rowley breaks his hand. Rowley starts to get lots of attention at school, and Greg becomes jealous, so he decides to fake an injury to get attention, but it doesn’t work.

Greg signs up for a class called Independent Study, where he has to work with other students to “come up with ideas for what [a] robot might look like and what kinds of things it would be able to do” (147). He wanted to sign up for Home Economics 2 because he was good at Home Ec 1, but “being good at sewing doesn’t exactly buy you popularity points at school” (145). Here, there is an illustration showing two boys teasing Greg for having an embroidered bag he made.

The boys and the girls decide to split into groups, and the boys spend the entire class period creating a list of “bad words the robot shouldn’t be able to say” (149).