01In short
STEMplore is the online learning platform for STEM For Others — a gamified site where students work through science and engineering courses.
I chose the technology it's built on and led development, coordinating a large volunteer team of designers, engineers, and curriculum writers.
02What I did
- Built the full-stack gamified platform, which now has about 2,000 monthly active users and 35+ courses.
- Selected and implemented the architecture: Next.js, TypeScript, Clerk, Drizzle ORM, NeonDB, Stripe, Zustand, Radix UI, and Tailwind CSS.
- Led 50+ curriculum developers.
- Organized 168 contributors across software design and development.
03The team behind it
Each dot is one person who contributed to STEMplore across design, engineering, and curriculum.
04What makes it game-like
STEMplore makes STEM courses feel more like a game than homework. Students work through 35+ courses at their own pace, and progress is built into the experience, so moving through the material feels like levelling up.
About 2,000 students use it every month.
05Why this stack
With 168 contributors, many of them volunteers who came and went, the stack had to be mainstream, well documented, and strongly typed. Next.js and TypeScript gave us a fast site and code that a big, changing team could work on safely.
Managed services handled the parts nobody should rebuild: Clerk for sign-in, NeonDB (serverless Postgres) with Drizzle ORM for data, and Stripe for payments. Zustand managed app state, and Radix UI with Tailwind CSS kept the interface accessible and consistent. That left the team free to spend its time on courses instead of infrastructure.
06Leading 168 people
The 168 contributors worked across software design and development, including more than 50 curriculum developers writing course content. Coordinating that many people, most of them volunteers, was as much a project-management job as an engineering one.
The key was a shared structure, so new content fit the platform and every course felt consistent no matter which curriculum developer wrote it.