Ever wonder what happens when creative minds combine with real-world science and high-flying adventure? Well, buckle up, because Matt and Kelsey have cooked up something truly special in partnership with the incredible NASA TechRise Student Challenge! This innovative student show is available to the public for the first time this spring, and is ready to take classrooms on an unforgettable journey. It all started with a chance meeting and a shared spark of excitement, leading to a collaboration that's about to send Elby – and maybe even your students' imaginations! – right to the edge of space.
Amanda Jeane Strode (AJS): What is this new CodeJoy student show, “The NASA TechRise Student Challenge Experience?” How did it come about?
Matt Chilbert (MC): This show was created to help promote the NASA TechRise Student Challenge — an exciting partnership that really happened by chance!
Kelsey Derringer (KD): We met Deanne Bell at Infosys Foundation USA Crossroads conference in 2023. We just really just hit it off and wanted to find a way to work together. Deanne is the CEO of the NASA TechRise Student Challenge with the Future Engineers program. In this Challenge, real students create real science and technology experiments which are sent up on real test flights! Some experiments are launched on rocket-powered landers that fly over simulated moon landscapes here on Earth; and some, like the one depicted in our show, are loaded and launched on high altitude balloons. When Deanne reached out to us to help support the Challenge, the answer was an enthusiastic yes.
AJS: Tell me about the show you created.
KD: In the show, Elby has created his own NASA TechRise Student Challenge experiment to test the effects of high altitude conditions on musical instruments. TechRise student experiments are all built into 4” x 6” clear containers, dubbed “2U,” because they are “2 units” tall. These boxes just happen to be about the same size as Elby — which becomes a factor in the show. So, in the story of the show, it’s launch day for the experiments, and Elby has made his experiment, but he's forgotten to code it, so the students help by creating the code.
They program a rotation servo to activate a music box, and a position servo to ring a bell. His experiment is scheduled to be sent up in a high altitude balloon; however, after it explodes, Elby accidentally gets loaded up instead, and he visits the stratosphere!
AJS: You all always try something new in every show. What was new in this show?
KD: Well first of all, Mike reconfigured our system to work with text-based coding, rather than our normal block-based coding. Since the real TechRise Challenge experiments are controlled with Circuit Python, a text-based coding language, it was important that we mimic that in the show to prepare students for their actual coding challenge.
We also created a method, through a combination of CodeJoy Live features and OBS features, to display selected student chats to appear on the screen, rather than just being read out by Matt the Robot. This is similar to what you might see on a gamer’s livestream, but we needed to be able to only display certain pre-approved chats on the screen. And we did it!
AJS: What was the collaborative development of this show like?
MC: Many of our shows go through several iterations, and this one is no different. Initially we had imagined Elby looking through a telescope at different constellations and exploring the stars from here on Earth. However, because this was intended to pair with the NASA Techrise Student Challenge directly, we decided to keep it more literal. One of the key features of the show is the set. In this show, Elby is in an R&D lab testing out his experiment.
This allowed us to envision what an R&D lab might look like in the robot world, which as it turns out is very much like what we imagine it looks like in the Star Wars world in the 70s.
This set is some amalgamation of 2001, A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Sneakers. To bring some of the science fiction to life, we actually looked at Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, one of our favorite movies. We took some visual cues from the TV studio segment where the room was kind of all white and there's these sort of large brutalist shapes.
The music inspiration was also music from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
KD: When we spoke with our music director, Bryce Rabideau, we gave him the scene when the glass elevator bursts through the roof. The feeling of this music was the inspiration for when the balloon takes off with Elby inside it. And boy, did he deliver. That is one of my favorite pieces of music he's written.
AJS: What’s special about the shows this month?
KD: This month, we have a special opportunity to share this collaborative show with the general public. Because this show was specifically designed for NASA TechRise Student Challenge, it is not a show any school district could purchase. Well, NASA TechRise have sponsored some public shows this spring, which means we get to invite classrooms from all over the US to join Elby in the stratosphere!
To join our FREE shows this month!
