Matt’s Garage - Our First Home
As many of you know, Matt and I founded CodeJoy in 2019, and officially launched the company in March of 2020—the same month that the COVID-19 pandemic went into full effect for many people. An interesting time to start a company, to say the least. That garage became a sort of little oasis for Matt and I as we weathered the storm. I’ll always be grateful to that little two-car garage below Matt’s apartment for incubating our big dreams and keeping us busy during the dark 
times. While many people were out of work or going stir crazy, Matt and I were making little cardboard robots, more worried about whether or not something was cute on screen than whether or not it would make money. We lived off our savings and Ramen noodles, we hung hammocks from the garage doors on nice days, and with nothing else going on in the city, we got to hone in on our big dreams with no FOMO.
But I’ll be honest with you—that little garage started feeling really small. By the end of our residency there, the place was so full of stuff you could hardly move. Matt is a master of making the most out of a small space, but even he ran out of places to put things in our tiny 450-square-foot space. It started to really feel like we were running our international company from the inside of a shoebox.
So we started looking for options about how
to get out of the garage and into a space that would suit a growing company with growing needs. We looked at lots of old places (Matt has an affinity for squatty square buildings with roll up doors), but we finally found it: An old school building just across the bridge in West Homestead, Pennsylvania. Our new home.
The History of the Cherry Street School
We don’t know everything about the history of this little yellow brick school building on the hill, but it’s revealing itself to us little by little.
When Matt was taking down a painted-over slate chalkboard to put up a more modern whiteboard, the 200-pound piece of slate actually fell on him (He’s ok! He’s tough!) to reveal an even OLDER piece of slate that had been signed by the teacher and the students in beautiful, scrawly cursive chalk handwriting. Even better, they had dated it: Feb. 8, 1908. It’s a time capsule - complete with an old math word problem about hay bales, and a kid named “R. H. Kennedy” who signed the thing about 5 different times. It’s comforting to know that there have always been R. H. Kennedy’s in class, even as far back as the turn of the 20th century.
A few of the contractors who have come by the school to help us do work actually attended the school decades ago and have told us some of its history—like Danny. Danny’s a charming guy with a thick Yinzer accent who fixed the roof when the shingles blew off in a big storm and gallons of water poured into the kitchenette right before one of Amanda Jeane’s Micro:bit in the Wild sessions in July. Danny and others gave us little caricatures of the teachers who used to teach here, and told us which rooms were which. As it turns out, our server room was once a dentist’s office. And the new CodeJoy studio was once Mrs. Small’s room. Evidently, Mrs. Small was a predictably short, impressively strict woman. Our office was once Mr. Pilot’s fifth grade classroom. And our workshop was once Miss Tizza’s 1st grade room, and she had big bushy hair, and was the kind of teacher everyone had a crush on. First grade teachers will always be our first loves.
For a few decades, the school was not a school anymore, it was the Pittsburgh Sign Company. There’s still a sign on the door, confusing everyone who visits us. We’ll change it eventually, but for now, we’re still finding sign-making remnants occasionally. For instance, behind one partial wall was another wall covered in what we assume were sticker and sign rejects and extras, for things like towing companies and pizza joints and skating rinks. The sign makers closed down a few years ago, and the school sat dormant and dusty for awhile, its only tenants being pigeons and mice.
But now, there’s a few of us who call this building our work home. We’re one of a motley crew of artists—bass guitar makers, art restorers, and even a NEW sign maker company. It’s great to be artists among artists. But even more, it’s great to bring learning back into this space that was built for it.
So What Are We Doing with All This Space?
We’ve got 5 classroom spaces to call our own. First and foremost, we built a larger, roomier replica of the original CodeJoy studio in Mrs. Small’s former classroom! It’s designed to look just the same on screen, but it sure FEELS different to stand there! We made many, many upgrades to the studio layout from what it was in the garage. We had the space since this ONE room is 900 square-feet (compared to 450 square-feet before, it’s literally twice as big!) The stripey green backdrop wall is a foot and a half further back. (Just enough room for Amanda Jeane’s dog Roseanne to snuggle up on her pillow while we teach.) The table is a couple feet longer. It’s built on a little stage, to allow the lead teacher and the tech booth operator to have sight lines with each other—a feature that got built out of the old studio a few years ago. (Matt got very 
good at nonverbally communicating with his right ankle, which was the only bit of him I could see during shows.) And the tech booth! We’ve got a sound board that looks like a spaceship control board, sound control, an LED-indicator microphone mute system, and about a million monitors everywhere. We’ve got a robot repair station, and actual storage space for our Student Show sets and extra robot projects. Matt even built Amanda Jeane and I a makeup station with a completely-unnecessary-but-very-fancy bluetooth-enabled mirror/speaker and extra storage for our makeup stuff. (Amanda Jeane is still adjusting to having to wear makeup every day when she’s on screen! I, however, got my cleansing routine down years ago.) Rather than suspending the metal light grid from an I-beam with a series of C-clamps like Matt had to do in the garage, he and the contractors ran thread rods up through the ceiling into a reinforced wood grid in the attic. The light grids are glorious, and sturdy. Matt did the “Lost Boys Woo Hoo and Swing” test himself. (He swung from the grid by his arms and yelled “woo hoo” to make sure it was strong. It was indeed strong, and worthy of an unmuted “woo hoo!”) We also hired a local Pittsburgh stage company to hang big, thick, black stage curtains on two walls. They’re great for absorbing the noise from the nearby train tracks, and blocking out all that pesky sunlight that ruins our stage lighting.
We also have an office! A real office, with desks we got from the Ikea “As Is” section, that match and everything! And shelves, and a couch, and really good wifi, and windows. I can’t overstate this enough: We. Have Windows. I worked in a dark garage for the past 5 years, because we had to have light control for the studio, which means no sunlight. There are big giant windows in here that go all the way up to the 15-foot ceilings.
And they have a great view: Displayed before us are the green trees, and red brick smokestacks, and winding brown rivers of Pennsylvania. That YouTube map guy could take one look out our windows and know our exact longitude and latitude. It’s so Pittsburgh here, and I love it so much. As I write this blog post, I’m sitting in the little corner office with the window open, listening to train sounds and feeling a perfect August breeze. It’s bliss, my gender neutral dudes.
Next to the office, we have a makerspace. The makerspace consists of some old teacher mailboxes-turned-craft-supply-storage, 4 white boards, and two custom built 8-foot by 4-foot tables, covered in cutting mats. We already put this space to good use when we did a show for NASA in May, fabricating the cardboard sets in the workshop and taking them immediately next door to the Asynchronous Studio to film with them.
We have a whole studio just for filming stuff! This little black box room next to the workshop is perfect for filming tutorials, cut scenes, and anything else we can think of in the coming months and years. So, get ready for a lot more media to be coming out of this educational media company!
We’ve got one classroom that’s currently devoted to be our workshop, where we make a lot of sawdust cutting wood and MDF for 
the unending list of little projects in Matt’s head, from extra shelving, to custom cardboard storage, to fixing up a little night stand he found in a dumpster and giving it some character to become a tea stand.
Our final classroom is going to become our next studio. It’s got a few walls, and a light grid, and it will soon become another custom teaching space for us to grow into.
Gratitudes
None of this—none of this—could happen without this team. My co-founder and the real visionary behind all of this, Matt, is the lead architect, builder, engineer, problem-solver, and designer of this whole studio endeavor, and he keeps making each iteration better. He has put more literal blood, sweat, and tears into making this move a reality and making this old school building into a beautiful home for us than even I will ever know. From repurposing every scrap he could find, to scraping 
pigeon crap out of tile grout, to making and remaking 6 rolling tables, to learning an entirely new sound system… My gratitude to Matt for all of this is so deep and so wide that it actually swallows me. While I did what I knew how to do best for the past year (teaching on screen), he has continuously solved new problems, unendingly. Mike, too, has invented new systems to network all our tech together, and he built and wired an entire server room. He keeps inventing little gizmos that solve problems before I can even fully understand them. Amanda Jeane, too, has added her touches like recycling, and all the plants. So many plants. Sue has even helped us find refurbished and sustainable materials and technology, all the way from Iowa. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank our contractors, Lee and Ian, for doing fantastic, reliable, and timely work in the space, as well. I am so grateful for our entire team in making this move toward growth possible.
In addition, we could not have made this move without the generous funding from the RK Mellon Social Impact Investment Fund. The award of this money in 2022/2023 made this move possible! Thank you RK Mellon, and Bobby Zappala!
What’s Next For CodeJoy?
When you would walk into the garage studio, the thing people noticed was the AUDACITY. People would walk in and immediately duck their heads and look up at the grid and down at the cement floor to figure out how to not bang their heads or trip on things. They would say, “Wow, you’ve done a lot in such a small space!” But they failed to see the growth potential of what we were doing, because there was no room to grow in the garage. But here, in this space, when you walk in, you’re struck with the possibilities. This place could be… well, anything.
Which is part of what inspired our next phase: The Anything Place Media. Over the coming year, CodeJoy as a company will be changing our name officially to “The Anything Place Media.” CodeJoy will continue to exist and to do everything that CodeJoy does—teacher professional development, live student shows, and selling robotics hardware—but as a department within a larger company. The Anything Place will provide similar services reaching into different content areas. Our next content area we are diving into is environmental education. Our summer PD course, “Micro:bit in the Wild,” was a very successful effort to build a bridge between our existing network and expertise (coding and robotics) to a new group of educators, standards, and needs. Be on the lookout for new PD opportunities, student shows, curricula, and other types of media from The Anything Place. We’re taking what we learned with CodeJoy and applying it to all new areas of learning. We hope that The Anything Place becomes PBS for the 21st Century.
Keep an eye out, folks. Big things are coming. We can’t wait to learn with you through this next phase.
All my best,
Kelsey
Want to Visit?
We’d be happy to host you for any educational events you may be hosting in Western Pennsylvania! Just reach out to hello@codejoy.org with any space-related inquiries.
Want to see all of the pictures? Take a look!