3 in 1 - STEMpump V3.1

What's new

Happy holidays everyone! It's time for another update post. Sort of. This update was originally planned as three separate updates, but we've been lucky enough to get them all out at once.

If you don't know, I'm Ritesh, the Executive Director and Director of Technology here at STEMpump.

And a quick description about STEMpump:

STEMpump is an educational organization dedicated to creating a global platform for contribution, collaboration, and expression. We aim to transform traditional education by offering a modernized teaching environment that gives students a medium to learn and contribute to our mission of free education for all.

This post will be a mix of technojargon and organization stuff, just to get ya prepared. And I hope for this to be way shorter than last time.

STEMpump Camps

To kick it off, STEMpump Camps! After 1.5 years of not teaching in real-time, we're ready to get back into it and better than ever before.

We've worked hard on refining every factor from STEMpump Online, and making the experience fast, simple, and student-first.

Camp Registration

With STEMpump Online, we used Eventbrite. It's an amazing tool with scale and worked for us then. However, we weren't happy with how tedious it was, and how complicated it could be for students. So we made our own version.

Our own registration system was a difficult task to accomplish, but we did it, and made it even faster and easier than before. Find a course, fill out your info, and you're done. Pretty easy, you never need to leave the page.

When you register, you'll also see a countdown timer till the camp (which I love), and can also learn a bit more about the camp. What's even cooler is our automated email system.

Being students, we're all pretty forgetful. With this new system, you'll receive an email when you sign up to confirm your registration. You'll ALSO receive an email an hour before camp starts as a reminder. It's one of our favorite parts of this.

Another big thing that I personally am proud of is our COPPA compliance. (ew, what?) If you're under 13, you will not be able to sign up without a parent or guardian's email. This is all legal stuff, so you can take it up with the government; I think the way we designed it was in the best intention of students.

Camp Interface

Also, new this time around is a custom interface for you to watch the camp. You'll still be able to join via YouTube (opens in a new tab), but this is a brand new way for you to learn and interact with us.

You'll have the camp in fullscreen, and important camp information on the side. That could be important links, files, or general information. You can wait to check this out or see some of our STEMpump Online camps in the interface. We've already moved the courses to the new standard.

* While messaging is not available in this interface, it's something we're looking into for the future. For now, you can interact with us via Discord or YouTube (opens in a new tab).

And that's STEMpump Camps! It's awesome to go back to our roots, with a whole new take on the idea. You can sign up for our January 2022 camps at stempump.org/camps

Library

Camps was the first update we planned for Winter 2021, but as we were developing it, we realized that there was a better way for content to work in STEMpump.

Having subjects, topics, camps, tags, and all these different pages is too much of a navigation cluster, something that impedes our idea of discovery. Enter, the brand new Library.

Discover

Library consolidates all STEMpump content into a single place. No extra pages or anything like that. Just click what you want to do on the sidebar, and you're good to go. But when you go there, you start off on the Discover tab.

Here, you can see a few pieces of important content that are perpetually refreshed, along with popular and recently updated courses. You'll also see Dice, in its infancy stage as a tool to discover new content. We hope to develop it further than a randomizer.

On mobile, Library also looks just as good, with a custom slide-in menu to replace the desktop's sidebar.

Courses and Camps

Continuing down the sidebar, all the subjects have been laid out, along with options for camps.

Courses have new filtering options to replace topics, giving an even more streamlined way to find content.

Camps also have new filtering options, as well as sections that differentiate between whether they have passed or not.

I hope that this new structure makes it easier to find the content you want, and we'll be developing this view actively over time, refining it as we go.

Designing for 2022

And Library made us revisit our PacificUI design language, and have it evolve as we head into the new year. This new evolution is lighter, and more modern, taking our past and showing it in a new light.

You'll see this new design in a few pages, as well as completely redesigned pages, like the Support Center and Blog. Others, like the About and Home pages, have had this applied too, without being structurally different.

Infrastructure Updates

And speaking to Infrastructure, we've added and updated all-new technologies to our site. Next.js is now on version 12, and TailwindCSS is now on version 3. These are core to the STEMpump.org experience, and performance and load times have never been better.

At the same time, we've added new AWS databases and servers to help with the new Camps backend, as well as new email servers for automation.

We've done some pretty big stuff with this v3.1 update. It'll be a while till our next update like this, but here's what you can expect over the coming months:

• STEMpump App V4
• New courses!
• New camps!
• New design for Courses, Lessons, Quizzes, and Projects
• An improved download process for content

We'll be adding new updates constantly to change the site in some small and big ways. If you want to keep up, check out our Releases page.

As we head into 2022, this has been a great year for platform updates, and we hope to continue that, with an equal emphasis upon content as well.

Happy New Year, and thanks for using STEMpump.

Ritesh Kanchi