Get ready for a hole-in-one learning experience with CodeJoy's Robot Mini Golf! This exciting project, dreamed up in the summer of 2020, brings together coding, creativity, and mini-golf in a totally unique way. Imagine a quirky mini golf course where the windmill spins like crazy and the crocodile's jaws are practically shut – that's the "Unfair Way" where our robot friend Elby needs your help! During the live show, students become the heroes, using their coding superpowers to fix these tricky obstacles and make things right.
But how did this amazing project come to life? Join us as we go behind the scenes with CodeJoy creators Kelsey Derringer and Matt Chilbert! In this exclusive interview with Amanda Jeane Strode, they'll share the inspiration behind Robot Mini Golf, CodeJoy's very first interactive student show, and reveal the secrets to designing a truly engaging learning experience.
Amanda Jeane Strode (AJ): For those who don't know, can you explain, what is Robot Mini Golf?
Kelsey Derringer (KD): Robot Mini Golf was our first ever show that we created and it kicked off the interactive element of CodeJoy. In the show, Elby really wants to win a prize at a mini golf course. But, the problem is, all of the obstacles are completely unfair, because he happens to be playing at a course called the “Unfair Way."
So for example, the windmill is too fast and the crocodile doesn't open its mouth very wide. By learning how to program different kinds of motors, the students make those obstacles more fair and more playable. Plus, there's a really cool interactive element of this show, which is the putter. We give students live control of this great putter mechanism, which can go back and forth to aim. Then when they have the putter lined up, they can trigger another motor to hit the ball. So, students actually get to golf live on this show!
AJ: Where did the idea for Robot Mini Golf come from?'
Matt Chilbert (MC): We had been building mini golf courses in our work with Birdbrain for quite some time by that point. It probably had been 3-5 years, and I know I had done a mini golf project with TechHive as well. I think craft robotics and mini golf just have this sort of natural overlap. When we were really focusing on getting this remote interaction thing working, a putter mechanism seemed to be a really good starting point. So I'd say that this is one of the shows that started with an interaction first and then a story developed around that.
KD: Something about the name “robot mini golf”, helps people know what it is just by hearing those words. So it was very straightforward in that way.
That putter mechanism was the first live interactive element that we ever got working, and our first play test was with Mike, our CTO's son, Zander. In Ohio, Zander curled up with MIke’s phone as the remote control, and we set up all these different obstacles for him to golf against - windmills, toilet paper tubes, tape rolls, anything we could find that looked fun! We were very much just playing with Zander, and then Mike would text us with what Zander liked. We were trying to make him stay on his phone for as long as possible! We asked, “what can we do that engages this kid?”
AJ: This might be the perfect opportunity to talk a little bit about when you first met Mike and what he's done for CodeJoy. Tell me more about that.
KD: Picture this: It's summer 2020, and we're running CodeJoy classes with Make: Magazine, armed with nothing but masking tape, a couple servos, and a dream. We didn't have our CodeJoy Live system at the time. We were using a sort of cobbled together system to let kids control robots. We knew it wasn't the final version, but it's what we could make work at the time. So, week after week, these two awesome kids, Zander and Penelope, show up to our Saturday Morning Maker classes, and they hang out and play with us for hours on screen. All the while, some grown up-type person is bringing them snacks and helping them out from off screen, but we can't see them, just their hands. Turns out, those hands belonged to Mike Cotterman, a fellow tinkerer who loved our vision. He started experimenting in his basement, picking our brains with a million questions, and before we knew it, we were controlling robots in Ohio from our studio in Pittsburgh! And that, my friends, is the origin story of CodeJoy Live.
MC: Mike is an extremely unique person. I can't put myself in his shoes. It’s the middle of the pandemic, there's all of this chaos going on and he's like, " What I want to do? I want to join this garage startup!" But I'm really, really glad he did. Mike thinks very differently from Kelsey and I. He's very technically minded. He's very detail oriented. Kelsey and I are kind of bigger picture people, in a lot of ways. But, one way that we are very similar is that we are constantly playing.
Mike asks, “How could I use this knowledge that I have to make learning more fun?” That's the question that really guides CodeJoy broadly.
AJ: What was happening in the world when you were making this first show? How did that experience impact Robot MIni Golf?
KD: Robot Mini Golf was initially created during the summer of 2020, and that year was really difficult globally, nationally for everyone. Not only was that the first year of the Covid Pandemic, but that was the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests. This being one of our first shows, we knew that we wanted to have an emotional center to each of the CodeJoy shows. It wasn't just about the code. It was about the characters, and the story, and some deeper meaning behind it as well. With Robot Mini Golf, we asked, "What do you do with an unfair system? You have to remake it!" That was one of the underlying messages that we wanted to incorporate into Robot Mini Golf. Letting kids feel that they have the power to change broken systems and make things more fair is important. We wanted to contribute, in our own way, to the conversation in Summer 2020, through creative little robots.
MC: Granted, that's a very lofty goal for a little show with cardboard robots, where a box wants to win a kazoo. However, it's just really hard to tell a compelling story without that emotional center. The world at that time was calling for needs to be addressed, and I think a lot of people were addressing the call in different ways. This is how CodeJoy addressed it.
AJ: We know that CodeJoy shows evolve over time. How did the elements of Robot Mini Golf that exist today come to fruition?
KD: The show itself is remarkably similar to the original version, but some of the things have been updated over the years. In the very first version, I designed and created a crocodile obstacle that was big and heavy and purple. It didn't really stand up to more than a month of serious use.
Matt remade the crocodile. I really like the new crocodile and it has withstood four years of some pretty serious use. I don't know how you (Matt) designed that thing so sturdy! That's literally made of cardboard and popsicle sticks, Matt, but I love this crocodile. It's great.
MC: He's a good little character.
AJ: Each of our shows has a companion project that teachers and students can try in their classroom. This show’s project is the Mini Windmill. Can you tell us about this project and what teachers can do with it in their classroom?
KD: It's sort of one of the coolest things you can do with a single servo that kids can then go play with. That's something that we think about a lot when we're creating robotics projects. How can we play with it? What do we do with it after? Do we just put it out on display? Do we talk to each other about it, etc. I think a lot of times when people see rotation servos and see how they move, they think about rovers. But creating your own rover is deceptively hard. And so, what's an easier, more straightforward project that you could do? This windmill project!
AJ: Then for the people who want to take that further, how do you scaffold? What does CodeJoy offer?
KD: We wrote out Robot Mini Golf as a curriculum, I don't know, six different ways at this point. It's been ever evolving. This summer we launched a professional development course for teachers, Robot Mini Golf: Project Based Learning. We outlined what a mini golf project would look like from beginning to the end. This could be for someone who's never built with a Hummingbird before, or who perhaps has never built anything out of robot parts before. We also see that many of the things that we recommend really have to do with learning as a whole, project-based learning. When you understand the steps of the project and the nuances of it, you can really apply this ideas or theme to any subject. When we did this course this summer, we had almost 200 teachers with us. They each got a Hummingbird Robotics Kit. and we ended up making five different projects with them over the course of our summer learning. We'd do a quick and dirty version of the mini windmill during the session. We'd give them 15 minutes of work time, then say, "All right, now go do your own version of this one as homework!” They'd bring that back to the next session and we'd reflect about it. It was so cool seeing what these teachers created. Some of them had really interesting and unique building materials. Other teachers made things and sent in videos of their cats in their mini windmills and just all sorts of things. But the coolest, I think, was seeing the teachers who went from never having built a robot before to making and designing their own mini golf obstacle that had multiple outputs and at least one input. Reflecting about that and seeing change throughout this process made our teachers want to see that same change in their students.
Want to bring Robot Mini Golf to your classroom? Check out our Robot Mini Golf page to find our Featured Project: Mini Golf PDF and Contact Us to start the discussion!
