Creating a flexible website that facilitates a culture of collaboration between STEM Clubs, schools, pupils and the British Science Association
Introducing STEM Clubs
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) Clubs allow children to explore, investigate and discover STEM subjects in a stimulating learning environment, away from the constraints of the school timetable or a prescribed curriculum.
The challenge
STEM Clubs wanted to create a website that would facilitate the sharing of projects, guides, resources and experience across After-School Science and Engineering Clubs, both publicly and privately between registered schools. The site had to encourage and enable the sharing of knowledge and online collaboration between club leaders, professional ambassadors, pupils and the British Science Association, all at different permission levels.
What we did
We began the project with our analysis and design phases, which encompass objective and KPI setting; functionality scoping; user personas and scenarios; information architecture and designing the site itself. The build phase was unique to STEM Clubs, with our development team integrating the site into the bespoke STEM Clubs Schools Database for authentication and Google Maps to create an interactive regional map showing participating clubs with markers. These markers linked through to bespoke school profiles created by club leaders.
We designed private and public areas of the site, with extra features becoming available on login. This allowed the various user groups to do different things in each area or access specific sections. Complex permission levels were also built into our content management system, OTHERobjects, allowing regional and national network staff; club leaders and ambassadors to create, submit and publish at various permission levels. Pupils were also able to post to the site but this was done via the front end interface, with pre and community moderation enabled.
The results
The STEM Clubs website has proved very popular and is well used by schools. The success of the STEM Clubs project helped us to beat stiff competition in an open tender process, to win the STEM Challenges website project -www.stemchallenges.net. This site features ten activities for schools that have been inspired by the London 2012 Olympics.