Space Jamboree is one of the Midwest's premier STEM-focused Scouting events. For their 18th year, the leadership team decided to move everything online: registration, payment, class scheduling, the works. We built the platform from scratch—a public-facing site that launched in February 2024, with the full registration system live by May ahead of the August event.
Technology Stack
A website, and then the harder part
Their previous website was outdated and didn’t work well on phones—which mattered for an event that parents and scouts were trying to access from wherever they happened to be. We started with a clean redesign that works on any device.
We started discussions in fall 2023 and began building in January 2024. The public site went up in February so participants could start learning about the event, and the registration system launched in May to give everyone time to sign up before the August event.
Registration, scheduling, and everything that comes after
The registration system handles participant enrollment, workshop selection, payment through Stripe, and confirmation emails via Postmark. It also automated the data exports the organizers needed to set up Zoom meetings and track merit badge completions— work that had previously required significant manual effort after registration closed.
Participants can browse available workshops, register for sessions, and get a confirmation with their full schedule. Organizers get clean data exports instead of a pile of paper forms to sort through.
Less paperwork, fewer headaches
The shift to online registration simplified operations significantly—fewer last-minute issues, less manual processing, and a cleaner experience for participants trying to figure out where they needed to be.
The platform was designed to grow, and it has. For 2025, we added tools to help instructors and scoutmasters manage the badge-awarding process. For 2026, we’re introducing multi-session classes to accommodate badges that require more time than a single session, along with experience refinements based on participant feedback. We’re glad to be a continuing part of how Space Jamboree delivers STEM education to scouts each year.