As the air turns crisp and the nights grow long, it’s time to return to the cobwebbed corridors of CodeJoy’s Robot Haunted House Student Show! If you’ve braved this twisty turny miniature dark ride experience in the past, you might be curious about the magic behind the curtain. How did Matt, Kelsey, and the CodeJoy crew conjure up such a captivating experience? I had the chance to sit down with our COO and co-founder, Matt Chilbert, to uncover the secrets behind this thrilling student-favorite show. So buckle up and prepare for a wild ride through the creative chaos that brought our haunted house to life!
Amanda Jeane Strode (AJ): What is the CodeJoy Robot Haunted House Student Show?
Matt Chilbert (MC): Robot Haunted House follows our main character, Elby, as he's about to go into a haunted house. While he’s a bit scared of what he might find in there, throughout the show, we help Elby to realize there's no reason to be scared. We do this by exploring the coding and robotics concepts that were used to make the haunted house “jumpscares.” The show culminates with Elby actually going into the haunted house to interact with the robotic jumpscares, controlled by students’ code, and we get to experience it with him. This is probably my favorite show that we have as CodeJoy!
AJ: Where did the idea for Robot Haunted House come from?
MC: I've been trying to make a miniature haunted house for years. I’ve been through a bunch of versions. One of my previous jobs was with the TechHive, a maker space at UC Berkeley, where middle school and high school kids would come in on weekends and staff would lead them through overly-ambitious design projects. One of these projects was a miniature haunted house. The design experience for the students was that they got to build a bunch of miniature animatronic characters that would interact with a 360 degree camera as it passed by on a small, line-following rover. But for users, the people that are going to experience the ride, they would wear VR headsets (Google cardboard, at the time).
The idea was that visitors would sit down in a mock dark ride car like the ones that you might get on in an amusement park. They would put on this VR headset and they’d see a wireless feed from the live camera moving through the miniature set. Because it was a 360 camera, they would get to look around. From the camera perspective, everything would look huge. It was our attempt to fit an amusement park experience into a classroom. Admittedly, this project never really took off. And, actually, it wasn’t the first time I had tried to make a miniature dark ride.
After film school, before I worked at the TechHive, I had tried to make a short film using the mechanics of a dark ride to carry an audience through a narrative. The audience would see a continuous POV tracking shot, passing these little scenes that were already in progress. The film was supposed to be 12 or 15 minutes long, so if Disney had actually made it into a ride, it would have to be several IKEAs bigs. But I made it at a miniature scale, so it could fit into my parents’ garage. I spent about two years on that: I hired artists and voice actors, I spent every cent I had, and I completely destroyed my parent's garage, but it never got off the ground. But that early project gave me a lot of experience with robotics, which ultimately had a huge impact on where I ended up.
AJ: I know that there are elements of this show that harken back to your own childhood and things you find joy in. What are some nostalgic elements that have inspired Robot Haunted House?
MC: I would not describe myself as a Disney person. Yeah, I love the process behind old animation techniques, but as a whole, I take or leave Disney movies. Disneyland really resonates with me, though. I grew up in California, so my family went there a lot when I was a kid. I particularly like dark rides. Those are the slow-moving storybook rides where you sit in the little car, you zig-zag through a little labyrinth, and look at bad animatronics.
It's a complete sensory experience. You get jerked around in the cars, the rides are usually lit with blacklights, so everything is glowing in these bright colors, there is music and sound effects. There's a smell that these rides have that is very nostalgic to me. Each one is a little different. I'll just be walking down the street and think, “Gosh, that smells like ‘Peter Pan’s Flight.’” There is a very, very specific experience to a Disneyland dark ride. Other theme parks have dark rides, but Disney really seems to dominate that market for some reason.
Dark rides are also pretty amazing in the way that they're able to guide your focus . The industrial guts are perfectly visible on the periphery. If you look up you'll see the lightgrid. If you look to the side of a scene the inner workings are right there in plain sight. But the engineers and designers direct your focus with a combination of movie magic and misdirection. But for me as a kid, I remember getting very, very lost in how these things were made.
AJ: What elements of dark rides are present in Robot Haunted House?
MC: In many ways the entire look of CodeJoy Student Shows is lifted from some of these rides. Dark rides often exist in these dark void spaces with hard theatrical lighting. That’s very much the look of the world behind Kelsey’s wall. “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” specifically has had a huge impact on the CodeJoy aesthetic. It’s this colorful, wacky, mostly 2D world. We’ve referenced the design elements of that ride a lot, not just in the Haunted House show.
The experience of going to Disneyland is mostly waiting in line. Because of this, Disney has spent a lot of time making the lines really interesting. During Robot Haunted House, Elby is waiting in line for a large part of the show. We also tried to make that experience interesting. You hear spooky sounds coming from inside the ride, you see these cars disappearing and emerging from doorways. You don't really know what's happening inside there. We wanted to build that anticipation, so that when you do go in, it is exciting… no matter how unconvincing the animatronics look. That's certainly inspired by these rides. Then, Elby gets loaded into a little car, and viewers see the entire experience from a phone camera strapped to a small remote controlled rover, called a Finch Robot.
AJ: Can you describe some of the constraints in building CodeJoy Student Shows?
MC: Our studio is pretty small. Everything is shot on a 4’ by 8’ table. It's a constant challenge to make this very finite space look big. Robot Haunted House has a carnival set with a ferris wheel and circus tents, and everything has to be compressed and perspectives need to be forced to fit it in our space. Additionally, everything needs to be built in a way that it can break down and be stored with our 9 other shows. That’s always tough.
Another constraint is time. We want to make sure that the student experience is 30 minutes. And, as important as the storytelling is to all of these shows, it's not the main point. The center of the show is student interaction and student learning. If we get too distracted with our cute little story, we’re losing valuable teaching time. It’s a balance that I think makes our shows unique.
AJ: Let's talk about the logistical making of Robot Haunted House. How many hours did it take? What were some of the things that happened and went into the physical creation of this show?
MC: We always knew that Elby would be standing out front of a haunted house and then go in. However the look and feel has changed a lot. We didn’t have the carnival, or the amazing tracks from our brilliant music producer, Bryce Rabideau, until 2022. We had to pass over it 3 times, to get the Haunted House story and look just right. The first step, and probably the biggest step, was creating a physical haunted house that the Finch Robot could drive through with the camera. Zipping along an 8’ table, the ride would be over pretty quick, so we added a lot of twists and turns to extend that experience inside the ride. That map took some figuring out.
Building the initial sets was probably 40 to 50 hours alone: laying it out, painting, building the scare features. Those have gone through some iterations over the years, too! The ghost and the spider have always been there, but there used to be a Medusa-like portrait that got replaced by a swirling sky. Making sure each element worked, and that we could actually drive through the whole thing smoothly, was key. Once the haunted house experience itself was finished, we also needed to build and film 2 or 3 other sets: the carnival and the exterior of the haunted house. The way that CodeJoy Student Shows work, we have a bunch of pre-recorded bits and those usually end up taking a lot more production time than building the set we use during the live show.
Overall, I would say, creating Robot Haunted House took 400 hours, taking into account all of the prop building, lighting, shooting, editing, OBS set up (that’s our video delivery system), and rehearsal time. This 2024 version of Robot Haunted House is actually the third version we’ve done as CodeJoy, and at least the sixth version that I’ve worked on over the past 10-12 years. Maybe that's why it's my favorite project.
AJ: We are showcasing our Jumpscare Project this month! Tell me about that project, where it came from, and what people can do with it in the classroom.
MC: When students see our shows, we hope they are inspired to go make their own projects! But, most classrooms don’t have 400 hours to sink into a single project. So, for each of our shows, we wanted to create something simple that a classroom of students could do in 1 or 2 class periods.
The Jumpscare Project was inspired by teachers from Seneca Valley School District in Pennsylvania. One teacher asked their students to create Jumpscare Robots (which you can see here and here). My favorite is the dracula vampire project—great job, Seneca Valley students!
We took inspiration from that and came up with a very flexible design with just cardboard, a popsicle stick, and one servo motor. The servo actually acts as the stand for the cardboard. The students have a lot of open-ended creative options, which is one of the main things we look for in a good simple robot build. The other thing that we look for is a robot that will be satisfying with a very simple code. All you need is a servo block, a wait block with the random operator, and a forever loop. I think Jumpscare is a good example of a practical coding concept that marries nicely with a fun build. And those are surprisingly difficult to come up with.
You Made It Out Alive!
So, there you have it! We hope you enjoyed this peek behind the scenes of CodeJoy's Robot Haunted House Student Show—Matt's favorite project for a reason! If you're looking to bring some Halloween fun and coding excitement to your classroom…
- Check out the Jumpscare Project!
- Join a Free Public Student Show (spots are limited)!
- Book a Private Student Show for the final week of October by Oct. 23rd and get $100 off!
- Register for the Birdbrain & Strawbees Halloween Webinar on October 9th!
- And don't forget to share your spooky creations with CodeJoy on social media! @CodeJoyEdu on most social platforms.
More Inspiration
Check out some of our favorite halloween inspired projects from twitter: