Welcome back, listeners. Today we are dropping another episode from our series called The Tuttleage of Treehouse.

The team at Treehouse is on a mission to diversify the tech industry through accessible education, unlocking opportunity, and empowering people to achieve.

In our series, we will be talking to leaders and students in the program to learn about

how Treehouse has impacted their lives, businesses, and careers. Well, today I have Daniel McElroy on

the Code Story podcast. Daniel, thank you for being on the show today. It's my pleasure. Thanks for

inviting me. Absolutely. Before we go too far and get into the West Virginia Coding Club, tell me and my audience a little more about you.

I am the 15th of 16 children. So I grew up in a very large, tumultuous family in Rhode Island.

My goal as a young man was to play for the Boston Red Sox.

However, that did not work out. But it did get me into college. While I was in college, I was volunteering a juvenile detention home down the street. They actually offered me when I graduated

from college. They offered me a job. I took it and I quickly found out they forgot to tell me that

they could not keep a teacher more than three months. I found out that a lot of these kids

had really poor reading skills, so I had a chance to really work with these kids. I went and

got a master's degree in developmental reading, and then lo and behold, I was invited to learn some improvisational theater

technique at the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Avon, and Connecticut.

I was learning these improv techniques. I only worked there doing that on weekends, and it paid good

money, and I took what I learned from there

and I thought, I'm going to invent a board game, a theater board game and I'll have a bunch of cards

with a bunch of improvisational skits that players would have to go through and so forth.

And I began to sell it, market it, mail order to high school drama teachers.

That was my market.

From there, I went to Kentucky, and I was a program director at a mental health, mental

retardation, community center.

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