Building an Online Student Community That Sticks

Community is built on shared experiences, whether that means gathering in a lecture hall each week or bonding over a common interest. Online, though, the dynamics shift. Students expect to be entertained and often need more structure before they'll participate. So how do you get hundreds of students to engage consistently throughout an entire summer without ever meeting in person?

Two student leaders from the Summer of Making program—Roshan Palakkal, a 17-year-old in the U.S., and Sam Poder, a 15-year-old in Singapore—figured it out. The program, run through Hack Club, offered a six-week sprint of daily challenges, weekly events, and campaigns aimed at helping students build technical projects. Hack Club backed the effort with hardware grants, event coordination, and mentor connections. Here are the three engagement strategies that worked.

Encourage Daily Sharing

The core of Summer of Making's engagement loop was Scrapbook, a virtual board where students post daily digests of what they're building. The site hooks into Hack Club's Slack, letting students share images in the #scrapbook channel; a bot called Scrappy then publishes those posts to the Scrapbook site. Both leaders called it the summer's highlight—and the numbers back them up.

  • 414 Hack Clubbers shared 5,628 unique creations
  • Contributors came from 35 different time zones
  • 7,010 unique emoji reactions

Scrapbook is open source, and participants extended it as the summer went on, adding CSS customization and even embedded MIDI players. The appeal, according to Sam, was the feedback loop: "When I post in Scrapbook, people respond. And I think having a community like that; it just makes you want to post again." Roshan echoed that it opened doors to conversations with people you wouldn't normally talk to and surfaced shared interests across cultures. Scrapbook proved so successful that it will continue through the school year.

Let Students Own the Experience

The sense of belonging in a community comes down to who feels included. Sam and Roshan spent nights supporting their peers, but the real driver was inviting others to lead. Hack Club's model let any student propose and run a Summer of Making event, with the organizers ready to help. As Sam put it, the trick is "letting people take initiative and do what they want, whilst being there to support them."

That approach yielded a diverse slate of student-run events, including:

  • A Cyber Security Capture the Flag with Katie Paxton-Fear as a guest
  • An Open Source Fiesta
  • Art Week and The Fine Arts Gala
  • A treasure island-inspired online scavenger hunt

Make Progress Visible and Rewarding

Large projects can overwhelm beginner programmers, so the program wanted to make incremental progress feel good. Scrapbook baked in participation streaks, similar to a GitHub commit graph or Snapchat streak, but with a twist: streaks reset after seven days to make it easier for newcomers to jump in. The incentive worked, even beyond expectations. One student built an external service to track streaks past the seven-day reset, and the longest run clocked in at 91 consecutive days of posts.