Our latest update
Hi everyone! It feels like yesterday that I wrote the last update post. This one will be much better than the previous one 😅
To get intros out of the way, I'm Ritesh, the Executive Director and Director of Technology here at STEMpump. I basically make sure everything works and doesn't crash and burn.
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.
There's a lot to talk about, but this post will be strictly about the platform. If you want to learn how we grow, adapt, and change as an organization, I'll be posting another post soon.
STEMpump.org
For the first time since our inception in 2019, we have moved over to a new domain. STEMpump.org is now the best place for all your STEAM needs. Don't worry;STEMpump.com will still redirect straight back here.
Student Experience
In the past year, we have spent time focusing, researching, and experimenting with the concept of the Student Experience, or SX.
We asked ourselves the following questions:
- How easy is it to go from point A to point B?
- How can we make X simpler?
- Why does X exist?
- Why aren't we doing X?
Now, these are strictly questions about the general user experience of STEMpump. But they play into the general concept of SX. However, SX begs to ask more questions:
- Why does the X method of learning work?
- How can we reinforce concepts and topics?
- How can we break down learning into more than just reading, but application?
- How can we appeal to students' own personal methods of learning?
These questions are the core foundation of our latest update. Every single element and interaction has been redesigned from the ground up, making both the learning process and the experience of using STEMpump easier.
So with that in mind, let's talk about the latest and greatest features.
Design Updates
As mentioned, we overhauled our entire design and interface system compared to last year. We wanted everything to feel smooth and snappy, allowing no speed bumps.
There are many more interactions, whether it be hovering on a lesson, course, or button. New shadows and fading provide new levels of depth, creating a much more sophisticated interface.
Universal Search
The first change you might notice is the search bar at the top of pages, Universal Search. On our old site, the only place to search for content was from Courses. Now you can search from absolutely anywhere, with even more freedom.
You can search for courses that contain videos, AP courses, Engineering courses, whatever. This is our first version, and we have plans to make it easier to search throughout STEMpump.
Discover (Courses)
The next thing is the new Courses/Discover page. If you use the STEMpump app, you may be familiar with Discover. For consistency, we brought it over with a few changes.
At the top, you will see a new Course of the Week. Below, you will see a new way to access each subject we have to offer.
And below this, we have our traditional Featured and New Courses.
Subjects
Subjects have been redesigned as well. Gone are the big scrolling views to select a topic. You can now select a Topic directly on the page, and all those courses will show up.
On top of that, courses can now have multiple topics. For example, Intro to Artificial Intelligence contains Programming, Python, and Artificial Intelligence. Clicking on any of those topics will have the course show up.
Course
On the course page, you will see new information, much more slimmed down from before. Only the information you need, nothing else: Chapters, Lessons, Challenges, and the Time it takes to complete the course.
Speaking of Chapters, we have reorganized how courses are structured. Once upon a time, we developed sections as a way to group lessons. That feature is now implemented as Chapters, allowing you to go through more structured content.
Lessons
Lessons have also been redesigned. Lessons also use Status, making that just as easy. We have changed the typography, making it easier to read and not be so cramped.
We've added a new heading that shows how long it takes to read the lesson (on average) and some information on the course. On the left (on non-mobile devices), you will see a new sidebar showing the entire chapter, allowing you to access it all. On top of that, you can go forward and backward in chapters.
One of the cool new features is Extensions. Extensions are new blocks that show up at the top of lessons with important links and files to download. No need to scour through, trying to find that one link or file. It's all at the top.
And there are a few smaller changes:
- Video interface improvements
- Updated/precise code highlighting
- Math support! (all the math people at STEMpump love this)
- Section Copying (click on any heading, and grab a link to that exact section)
New Features
Now let's jump into the new features. We wanted to make sure we could update everything we have done and add new features to make the student experience even better.
Quizzes
Reading gets a bit boring as time goes on, no? Just chugging through content, hoping you remember it. It's tedious, and you don't really know if your brain remembered that one definition or all of them.
We've added new quiz types to courses. After a few lessons, you will be given questions that correlate directly to the content you just learned.
This way, you can see if you are missing anything and find where you need to spend more time.
And it's not just multiple choice. We've added short-term questions as well, allowing you to type your answer in as well. We hope to add more question types as time goes on.
Projects
And that's not all. We've added a new project type to courses. These open exercises allow you to apply what you learned directly. What is a better way there than pure practice?
We'll provide a few parameters/instructions/whatever, and you can go ahead and follow the project. You don't even need to follow what we give you.
We also add a few hints you can open (there's no problem there). If you get stuck, we.
In the end, you can hover over a blurred solution. It's kind of like when you have the answers next to you, and you check it really quickly, then turn it back over. Or when you are ready, just hit show solution. Like quizzes, we hope to add more solution types to projects as time goes on.
Infrastructure Updates
The biggest changes to our platform were all under the hood. We can't expect to teach students about the latest and greatest if we can't practice the latest and greatest.
I'll only talk about it a little since a lot of it is technobabble.
Platform Development
We have firstly moved completely to React and Next.js. It was definitely a difficult task, redesigning and rebuilding everything from scratch, but worth it. We will be able to bring more features and content to you faster and smoother than ever before.
Everything that was holding us back before is gone, so you are using clean code. Things may feel a bit rocky, but we are pushing new optimization and processing updates all the time now.
On top of that, we've moved to TailwindCSS, allowing us to style faster, all while being compact and small. It's given more design liberty to us and allowed us to develop and design that much faster.
Hosting
We have moved our entire platform off the ancient servers they were on and onto Netlify's shiny edge network. Everything now runs off of it, and we're delighted with how it turned out so far.
Netlify allows us to leverage their CDN and edge network to make sure we have safe and secure builds, along with virtually no-cache. No more clearing cache to get the latest. What's great is that Netlify uses AWS, GCP, and DO to make sure the site runs fast, from anywhere.
Like the rest of the system, we will be pushing out constant updates to make things faster and smoother. There's always more we can do.
Asset Distribution
We host a lot of images, videos, files, and other media. We have distributed our entire asset distribution system to AWS S3 and GCP, making it so you can download and view assets fast, from anywhere in the world.
Other Updates
There's a lot of changes, and above are only a few major ones. Here's a quick list of a few other new things:
- Courses (current updates rolling out over the next month, with new/updated courses every month after)
- Updates to EVERY course
- New AP, social-oriented, and business-oriented courses
- New STEAM courses
- Accessibility Improvements
- A redesigned mobile experience
- Improved PDF Exports
- Redesigned Certification
- App Improvements (by the end of the year)
- A new Support Center for all your needs
- New Blog
- New Hiring Page
- New Home Page
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.
And once again, thank you for using STEMpump.
Ritesh Kanchi
