Memory is a tricky thing. An old family photo might have you falling out of your chair with laughter, while a silly story from decades ago might gut you with unexpected grief. CodeJoy’s “Robot Memories” show and accompanying project invites students to reach back, remember, and program memories into existence. In a warm and candid conversation CodeJoy’s CEO Kelsey Derringer explains how “Robot Memories” became a tribute to lost loved ones and a celebration of shared stories. Behind the fun, the coding, and the cardboard characters lies a powerful reminder: we keep our loved ones alive through the stories we tell.
Amanda Jeane Strode (AJ): What is the CodeJoy Robot Memories Student Show?
Kelsey Derringer (KD): In this show, Elby is visiting his Grandma Dottie at her house, which is decorated with pictures on the walls showing scenes from her life. Each picture is a story, and she’s trying to tell Elby stories from her life. But the problem is… she can't quite remember all the details of these memories. So, students learn to program LEDs and motors, and as they write those programs, the code literally brings her memories to life. It's a show about connecting with family through storytelling—just in time for the holidays! But there's also a little subtext to the show: all of Grandma Dottie’s memories are about Grandpa Walter, who's not there. This show reminds us that telling stories is an important way to keep our loved ones close, always. I think this really resonates with anyone with an elderly loved one, and anyone who has lost someone. But it manages to do this while also being fun, and silly, and full of heart.
AJ: Where did the idea for Robot Memories come from?
KD: While at BirdBrain, Matt and I did a project with teachers called the Memory Box project. Matt brought the original idea from his days at the Tech Hive I think! The idea was that you would make this entire memory inside of a little cardboard box, and then there'd be one little viewing hole in the side of the box, like a peephole, with a distance sensor mounted just below the hole. When you got close enough to look through the peephole, the memory in the box would come to life. It was a really clever design that demanded that you interact with it closely. When you had a bunch of these boxes lined up next to each other, it was like a whole line of little mysteries. It was enticing!
We did a couple versions of that memory project at various PDs with teachers. It was really well-received by those teachers, I think because it was so personal, so intimate really, and so different from the “battle bots” model of robotics. When I taught it, I would pair up teachers who didn’t know each other and have them come up with a shared memory. It could be some historical event that they both remembered, or perhaps a similar experience they both had as kids. I would end up having teachers who had never met each other before deeply connecting with each other, telling each other stories from their childhoods and discussing differing perspectives on historical events. It was a fascinating interpersonal experience—facilitated by a creative robotics project. It really opened up a lot of possibilities for those teachers.
AJ: Tell me a little about the history of the Robot Memory show. How did that project become this show?
KD: The Student Show Robot Memories has gone through a lot of different versions. In the original plan, it more closely followed the Memory Box project: all of Grandma Dottie’s memories were literally in Grandma Dottie’s cardboard box head. The idea was that you’d see a close up of her face, and then she’d turn her head to the side and then the memory would be inside her head. We couldn’t really get that to work logistically, though, so we did a little movie magic with a zoom in and fade into the memory.
The first version of the show we ever did was with our dear friend Gale Tate (hi Gailie!) with the group Commonpoint Queens, a Jewish community organization based in NYC. The design of the show was really different in that version: Grandma Dottie’s house was much smaller and more cluttered, and the interaction was much more about looking around her house at all her cool, weird stuff, and trying to find the right “secret thing” to bring back her memories. It had some good ideas, but lacked the heart of the current version. 
But I remember this version of the show was part of Commonpoint’s virtual Hanukkah celebration in 2020, so Grandma Dottie had a menorah on her fireplace. It was so cool to be a part of that community’s tradition that year. We got to hang out on Zoom while a family in NYC gathered around their own menorah and sang the songs and lit the next candle. Our little show about telling stories was part of this much bigger, much older story, and that felt very right.
We revamped the show in 2021, though, and made some better design choices, and made the story much stronger. We also added the subplot about Grandpa Walter.
Every version included the live control element, though: midway through the show there's a “power outage” and so the students use a flashlight to choose which picture (and therefore which memory) we zoom in on. In the original show, there was a simulated rainstorm, with lightning and thunder, and it was cool, but a little messy. This version with just a straight up power outage is much cleaner. Plus, it enables us to do the Choose Your Own Adventure thing.
AJ: That’s right! This show uses a Choose Your Own Adventure format. Where did that idea come from?
KD: With each of our CodeJoy shows, we always try something new, technically, to challenge ourselves. (Really, we just create fun problems that Mike has to solve with the CodeJoy.Live website, but he seems to have as much fun as we do!) Every show gives kids the ability to write and submit code to us to control motors, lights, and/or sensors. With our first show, Robot Mini Golf, we had the live control putter feature. And in Robot Memories, we wanted to challenge ourselves to create a Choose Your Own Adventure show, something that you could come back to again and again and get a new experience every time. We came up with the idea of the narrowed beam of a flashlight being used to choose the next memory from options on the wall.
AJ: What inspired the characters of Grandma Dottie and Grandpa Walter and the way that they look?
KD: These are two of my favorite characters in any of the shows that we do! It’s funny—Elby, as it turns out, is a very specific little design. Even when you’re trying to recreate him, if you move the eyes just a little, or make them a slightly different size, he looks like a completely different person. Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent almost as much time in a dark, drafty garage with Elby as I have with Matt, but I can always tell if we’re working with the original Elby or not!
So, we were trying to recreate multiple Elbys for a show we did in summer 2020. It ended up being a terrible little show that didn’t work at all! (It’s all part of the process.) The little bots we made were all supposed to be singers in a pop group called “The Box Street Boys.” (Get it?) Well, kids did not get the joke, because we are old, but the parents seemed to like it. Even though we were trying to make clones of Elby, none of them turned out the same. Little differences, like, how far the head is off of the neck or how far apart the eyes are make it look completely different. So, these extra little bots just sort of sat on the shelf for a couple of years and we ended up recycling them and turning them into characters for other shows, like Robot Memories.
One of them turned into Grandma Dottie. On that particular robot, the head was a little bit closer to the body and so it doesn't have much of a range of motion for the vertical axis. That's kind of perfect for a grandma robot, because real grandmas’ necks don't always have a great range of motion either. Grandpa Walter was one of the “extra Elby” robots as well.
We gave each of them little add-ons for character traits. Grandpa Walter has a green bow tie and a salt-and-pepper mustache. (You might notice a younger version of Grandpa Walter in Robot-Paper-Scissors as the boxing ring announcer!) Grandma Dottie got these half moon red glasses. It’s funny, the characterization of these robots comes from not only how they look, but also how they’re programmed. Grandma Dottie has a very signature way she nods “yes”— she always does a decisive little “down-up-down” motion. This was very much inspired by the fact that she looks out over the top of her little glasses. My favorite characterization element has to be her teeny tiny little cardboard walker, which has little bright green puff balls on the end, which look like tennis balls. It makes me laugh every single time!
One other little detail about the character design for these robots: we had to make them look “old.” As you probably know, Matt has a background in puppetry, and it was fully on display here. He very carefully and very lovingly distressed these boxes. He would tear little strips of the cardboard off, so that you can see a hint of the corrugation underneath. He would dent one of the corners very carefully. And if you look very, very closely… They have wrinkles. There's a shot at the end of the show where you see a close up on Grandma Dotty's and Grandpa Walter's faces. You can see that Matt very carefully carved little wrinkles under their eyes and little crows feet at the side of their face. I love that. It gives them so much character.
AJ: We know that Codejoy Student Shows take a long time to develop. Last month's show Robot Haunted House took about 400 hours to put together, and there were logistical challenges and constraints involved. What are some of those challenges and constraints for this show?
KD: I’ll be honest: This show nearly broke us. The fun part of Choose Your Own Adventure is that the participants have options, which means every show is different because we don't 
know what the kids are going to choose. The difficult part is that you have to have a bunch of adventures prepared, ready, and set up that are never going to get chosen during a single show. And so, there are seven different pictures on Grandma Dottie’s wall, which means we need to have seven different memories ready to go, even though we only ever get to see two or three of them during a single show. Plus, we have to be able to very quickly (and quietly) transition from inside the apartment to inside a memory and back. So, Matt had to devise a system that would enable him to completely change the set and lighting multiple times throughout the show in under 2 minutes. Oh—and it all has to be able to be stored in an 18-inch storage box.
The logistics of this show involved Matt spending three long, cold days in the garage studio designing, cutting, and painting these MDF flat plates that are about three feet wide and a foot and a half deep. To create the memory, he places the flat layers of the memory into little pre-drilled holes in the MDF plate, and slides a solid black background onto the back to block out Grandma Dottie’s apartment which stays put for the whole show.
Honestly, I had the fun job. While Matt was measuring and cutting and painting and drilling those plates, I got to design and create the memories themselves. We brainstormed about 50 ideas for memories that were also something like “tall tales,” then drawing them out, and building the foreground, middle ground, and background cardboard layers one at a time. We worked on it for days, weeks! But suddenly, we were just a few days out from debuting the show, and we didn't even have all the memories made! Everything about this show took five times longer than we thought it would! 
We actually called in our friend, Dave English, who's a puppeteer based in Pittsburgh, to come in and just help us make cardboard thingies. The cactuses you see in the desert scene, Dave made all of those. The house that has the hiccups, that was Dave. Dave made all the crying onions. Dave made all of the really weird-shaped clouds. I'm so glad Dave was there because those clouds are a fever dream of cumulus and they're awesome! We really relied on Dave. We could not have finished this without him coming in!
AJ: I know that Robot Memories has a lot of personal meaning for you. Would you tell me about that?
KD: As I was growing up, I was always really close with my grandparents. My mom and I went over there every Sunday night for Sunday dinner. I even lived with them a couple different times. I was so lucky, I really had two extra parents growing up: my Grandma and Grandpa.
I think many of us have had the experience of watching someone we love get older, and watching their memory fade and fail a little bit. I’m sure many of us have even lost a loved one. My Grandpa was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and dementia in 2019, but we had all seen that coming for a long time. By 2021, when we revamped this show, his health was really failing. It was both really hard and really healing to be making a show that was about loss, memory, and storytelling during that time.
My Grandpa passed in 2022. It would have been his 92nd birthday this month. I will always always miss him, this silly man who staged winking contests with me across the dinner table my whole life. What a blessing grief is, to love someone that much.
There's a moment at the end of the show where Grandma Dottie looks at her wall full of memories, and they are all moving, living again with the code the kids wrote. She turns her head to look at the smaller portrait of Grandpa Walter she keeps close to her on a table. There’s a moment of longing as she gazes at this unmoving picture. And suddenly, his picture comes to life as well. And for a moment, she is with him. They lean their heads together, and for a moment, he’s there, and she’s whole. That’s the power of stories. We can do this show five times a day, and this moment still gets me. And they’re just cardboard! But the message is clear.
This show reminds me that the people we love will always be with us, and within us. That their stories are our stories. And that we always keep them with us as long as we keep their stories with us. This show for me is a love letter and a thank you to my own grandparents, Pat and Richard, for all of our stories. And it’s a promise to keep telling those stories.
AJ: We are showcasing our Memories Project this month. Tell us more about this project and what people can do with it in their classrooms.
KD: With each one of our shows, we often get teachers and even students writing to us telling us that we’ve inspired them to make something. However, as we've shared, each of our shows takes hundreds of hours to create. That's not really practical for your average classroom. So instead we try to think of simplified projects that are classroom appropriate and follow our First Project Guidelines.
- Outputs only
- Simple code
- Simple build
- Creative choices
Something I love about this project is that it really celebrates the individual experience that the maker brings to the project. What is a happy memory? What is an influential memory? What is a shared memory? Use robotics to share that story with someone else!
As a former English teacher, one of my favorite units to teach was the personal essay unit. Take a story from your life and frame it within the narrative arc as a way to make and share meaning. I love that the same experience can be had with maker tools and robotics and coding.
AJ: Any last advice for teachers?
KD: For teachers, if I can offer one additional encouragement, this project is an amazing opportunity to let your students really share themselves with you and with each other. It’s a lovely way for you to share a personal story with them as well. Learning is a vulnerable process. You have to admit you don’t know something, and then you have to try something (and maybe be bad at it!) in front of other people. How mortifying, right? But we can create the safety to learn by creating space for our students and ourselves to share authentically. I really believe that the Robot Memories project, and others like it, can be a tool for developing meaningful relationships with your students.
Want to bring Robot Memories to your classroom? Check out our Robot Memories page to find our Featured Project: Memory PDF and Contact us to start the discussion!