// Building
We're giving every club at OTHS a real page. This is the track that writes it — the pages themselves, the search and filtering on top of them, and the platform underneath. Join it and you ship to the real site in your first week, from a browser tab on your school Chromebook, and nobody expects you to arrive knowing any of it.
A committed track · about 2–3 hrs a week including the meeting · no audition and no prerequisite — you join by saying you want in
// How it works
Not after a semester of lessons. Your first contribution is a small one, and it goes on the real site. You learn as you go, and build more as the semester goes on.
All of that starts once you've joined the track, and joining takes saying so. If you're not ready to decide, you don't have to — come to meetings, learn in the room, and take this door when you want it.
We open with an install party: a GitHub account, an invite to the repo, and one real change each — a line on a club page, a fixed typo, your name in the contributors file. It gets reviewed, and then it's on the site.
Most weeks are working meetings, not lectures. Here are tonight's clubs — go. Then whoever is stuck puts the error up on the projector and the room debugs it together. We close on thirty seconds of what went live.
There's no launch day and no held-back reveal. A club page is finished, it's reviewed, it ships — and the directory is bigger than it was that night. It starts with a handful of pilot clubs and keeps going, which means people outside the club are using it long before it's done.
// How far you take it
This is a description of where people end up, not a gate they wait behind. You climb when you want something the next rung can do — and plenty of people never need to.
Write and edit what a club page says, through GitHub's web editor
Needs: a GitHub account, and a place on the building or design track
Adjust a page's styling, images, and structure
Needs: HTML and CSS
Build the search, the filtering, the index page, the admin tooling
Needs: JavaScript
Template architecture, code review, deployment
Needs: a couple of semesters on the track
A member who never leaves the first rung all year has still done real, necessary work. Most clubs at OTHS need exactly that person — someone willing to sit down with a sponsor, ask what the club actually does, and write it up clearly.
// The path
Five stages, in order, at whatever pace you move. The curriculum is a reference, not a gate: you ship first, then reach for the lesson that fixes whatever is bothering you. Nobody expects you to arrive knowing any of it, and the material starts at the very beginning.
STAGE 01shipping on day one
A GitHub account, an invite to the repo, and a club page to work on. You edit it in a browser tab — no installs, no admin password, nothing touching a district device — and a preview link appears with your change on it. Someone reviews it, and then it's on the site.
You'll be able to
Point at a page on the internet and say which part of it is yours.
STAGE 02when you want it to look different
You shipped a page and now the spacing bothers you. That's CSS — and here's the lesson, from The Odin Project, a free and open-source curriculum used by people teaching themselves to code all over the world. Structure, then style. Flexbox and grid. Holding together on a phone.
You'll be able to
Change how a page looks and know why the change worked — then rebuild a layout you like from scratch.
STAGE 03the first real milestone
Two to five friendly clubs, to prove the template, the workflow, and the review process at a size where getting it wrong is cheap. Nothing else in the plan starts until this exists — and once it does, every page after it ships the same way: finished, reviewed, live, no waiting for a launch date.
You'll be able to
Hand someone a link to something you helped build. Your name is on the site, alongside everyone else who worked on it.
STAGE 04making pages do things
A hundred clubs is far too many to scroll through, so the directory needs search, filtering by meeting day, and an index that sorts itself. That's JavaScript: variables, functions, and loops, aimed at something you already want to exist.
You'll be able to
Build something interactive inside a real codebase — a search box that filters a real list, a form that validates itself.
STAGE 05for the school
Dev and design split into their own weekly sessions, and work gets handed out in real pieces: a club page, a feature, a chunk of admin tooling. Code review happens in front of the room — rigorous but kind, and the standard is "would I want this in production."
You'll be able to
Read someone else's code well enough to review it, and hand something you built to the person who takes it over after you.
// The practical part
We write code in GitHub Codespaces, which runs in a browser tab. Nothing gets installed, nothing needs a district password, and nothing touches the machine itself. Everyone uses the same setup, so there is no laptop-versus-Chromebook divide in the room.
Your first contributions go through GitHub's web editor: you open a file, change some words, and click a button. That is the whole of the Content rung, and it is where everyone starts. You pick up the rest by using it, and the first meeting walks the room through it together rather than leaving you to hit a setup error alone at home.
Most members will start with none, and your first contribution won't require a line of code. The curriculum starts from zero on purpose, and the first meeting assumes you have never opened a code editor.
This is a committed track, so here is the whole of it in writing, before you say yes rather than after:
That's the entire list, and there is nothing else hiding behind it. There's no audition, no prerequisite course, and no track record you have to show first — you join by saying you want in.
If it stops working out
Nobody gets removed from this club for falling behind. A season, a job, a rough semester — say so and take a declared leave, and your seat is still there. That's a normal thing to do and we would much rather you did it than disappeared.
If it keeps not working, you move back to the learning track: still in the club, still in the room, still on the Discord, and the door back into this one stays open on exactly the same terms as everyone else. Two officers handle that conversation, never one, and it doesn't happen in front of anybody.
Fall: the one-hour all-hands meeting, plus an hour or two of your own — about two to three a week all in. Spring costs more, and we'd rather say so now than let you find it out in January: the all-hands, plus a 45-minute session for this track on top, plus one to two hours of your own. If that's more than you have when spring arrives, say so and step back — see above.
Nothing. No dues, no software to buy, no materials.
Why it's built out of boring parts
The directory runs on plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, on purpose. Whoever runs this club in 2028 has to be able to read the code, run it, and grow it — which rules out anything that needs a framework tutorial before you can fix a typo.
Sign up in the terminal — five questions, and "building" is one of the answers. You can switch tracks later, or come to a couple of meetings first and decide there; nobody's holding you to it.
