Case study
A national hub for
youth STEM work.
A digital hub for Canadian youth to explore, register, and showcase their STEM projects.
The problem
Youth Science Canada needed a single, public-facing hub where Canadian youth could explore other students' STEM work, register for programs, and showcase their own projects — three different use cases, one platform.
The constraints
- Public discovery ("explore") is a different use case from private registration — the platform needed to serve anonymous browsing visitors and registering students from the same codebase.
- National in scope, not regional, so the showcase side needed to stay browsable at a larger scale than a single-institution portal.
The decisions
Built on the same shared ProjectBoard registration platform used across its education clients (Vuex, Bulma CSS, Firebase, Go, MySQL), with Algolia handling project discoverability specifically for the public "explore" side rather than treating search as an afterthought bolted onto a registration form.
What shipped
The digital hub live at partner.projectboard.world/ysc.
What's changed
National in scope since launch — Canadian youth across the country have used this hub to explore, register for programs, and showcase their own STEM projects, anonymous browsing and private registration served from the same codebase. It's still live and in active use today.