The problem
As president of Auburn's Web Development Club, I kept running into the same gap: people would come to meetings interested in web development, watch a presentation, and leave without ever having built anything. Lectures don't make developers. What was missing was a low-stakes, recurring reason to actually write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — small enough to finish in a week, real enough to be worth showing someone.
The approach
The answer was weekly project challenges, all collected in one public repo organized by semester and week. Each week got a concrete, self-contained build: one week was a personal portfolio page, another was a to-do list app, and the semester built toward a larger project — a campus events site. Everything stayed deliberately close to the metal: plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no frameworks, no build tooling, nothing to install beyond a text editor and a browser.
That constraint was the point. A framework hides exactly the things a beginner needs to wrestle with — what the DOM actually is, why layout behaves the way it does, what happens on a click. Vanilla projects meant every member could open their file, refresh the browser, and see cause and effect with nothing in between. It also meant nobody spent their first meeting fighting a toolchain instead of building.
Keeping it in a public repo mattered too. Members could look at how other people solved the same prompt, and everyone finished the semester with a small body of work that existed somewhere linkable rather than in a folder on their laptop.
What I'd do differently
Build the on-ramp for the gaps. A weekly cadence is great for momentum and rough on anyone who misses two weeks — the challenges assumed you'd done the previous ones, and people who fell behind tended to stay behind. If I ran it again, each week would be genuinely standalone, with the connective tissue as optional stretch goals instead of prerequisites.
What broke
Participation, before the format did. Early on, the challenges were described in meetings but not written down anywhere durable — so anyone who missed the meeting missed the week entirely. Moving everything into the repo, where each week's folder was the assignment, fixed more than organization: attendance stopped being the price of admission. The lesson generalizes — if the only copy of something lives in a meeting, it doesn't really exist.