How a Glasgow after-school STEM club ran competition prep in structured Bitir cohorts

Aisha Stewart runs Clydeside STEM Club out of a converted halls room above a community centre in Govan, on the south bank of the Clyde. Twenty-five pupils aged 9 to 14, four competition teams, and a Google Sheet that nobody under the age of forty would willingly open. One Bitir cohort per team lifted first-round qualification rates from 38% to 84%, and the six WhatsApp groups the parents tolerated were closed inside six weeks.

Where the club started

Aisha grew up in Govan and read mechanical engineering at the University of Strathclyde. She spent eleven years at BAE Systems' Scotstoun yard, on submarine combat-systems integration, then left in 2021 with the modest plan of running a Saturday morning club for a dozen local kids whose schools, like her own had been, did not really have the bandwidth for the harder end of D&T or computing science. The first session was eight pupils and one second-hand VEX IQ robotics kit. By the end of 2024 the club had twenty-five pupils, four competition teams, two volunteer tutors (both Strathclyde engineering undergraduates), and a small Big Lottery grant that paid the rent on the room.

The four competition tracks Aisha picked are deliberately the ones that take a primary or early-secondary pupil from "interested" to "has actually built something a judge can score": VEX IQ Robotics for the youngest, First Lego League for the next band, the British Science Association's CREST awards for solo science-fair entries, and Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge for the coding-leaning pupils. Each track has fixed deadlines, a fixed scoring rubric, and a regional first round at which most teams from a club like Aisha's historically do not progress.

The old system, and why it broke

Until early 2025, Aisha ran the whole thing from one Google Sheet of fourteen tabs and six WhatsApp groups.

The Sheet held the four teams, the build log for each pupil's task, attendance, parent contact details and a colour-coded "ready for the next stage" column. It worked for Aisha. It did not work for anyone else. Parents had never opened it; pupils had never opened it; her two volunteer tutors opened it on Sunday evenings and quietly hated it.

The WhatsApp groups had spawned the way they always do. One per team, one for parent admin, one for "Saturday morning weather and closures". On a busy week they produced about a hundred and forty messages, the useful ones — "Maya's gear assembly has slipped, we need a parent to bring an M3 bolt" — buried under photos of finished builds and somebody's dog.

The breaking point was the spring 2025 First Lego League regional. Aisha's junior team, the Govan Rovers, had a robot that worked beautifully in the club room and a research project poster the team had not actually finished printing. Two pupils had assumed the other was on it. The colour-coded tab had a green cell for "poster" that Aisha had ticked in February based on the draft and never updated. The team came twenty-second of twenty-four.

What she tried first

Aisha tried Trello in March 2025 with a board per team and a card per build task. It lasted four weeks. The pupils could not be bothered to open it, the parents did not know what Trello was, and Aisha discovered she had simply rebuilt the Sheet's problems on a different surface. She also trialled a school-management SaaS that her local council recommended, which was built for registers and fee collection and had nothing to say about a build log.

A parent of one of the CREST pupils — a software engineer at a Glasgow fintech — mentioned Bitir. He had used it for his own team's onboarding and pointed out, sensibly, that the shape of a STEM club competition team is almost exactly the shape of a small coaching cohort: a fixed group, a fixed goal, weekly tasks visible to the people who need to see them, and one adult guiding the whole thing.

How she set the club up in Bitir

Aisha made four decisions in the first fortnight of summer term 2025 and has not changed any of them since.

1. One private cohort per competition team. Govan Rovers (First Lego League), Clyde Coders (Bebras), CREST Crew (British Science Association), and the VEX IQ Yard. Each cohort is a private Bitir group; the pupils are members; their parents are members; Aisha is the manager; her two volunteer tutors are helpers.
2. Per-pupil competition goal. Each pupil's role in the team build is the individual goal — "lead programmer", "mechanical chassis", "research poster" — with the build log as the goal's milestone list. Items are tickable from a phone at the club bench.
3. Door attendance scan. Pupils tap in at the door on Aisha's tablet when they arrive. The week's attendance feeds the cohort attendance card automatically, with no register on paper.
4. Sunday-evening home-build assignment. Each Sunday at 18:00 Aisha posts a short three-line home task for the week — "read these two paragraphs of the FLL rulebook, sketch your gripper iteration on the back of the brief, bring it Saturday" — with a tick-off for each pupil. Parents see the task; pupils tick it; nobody chases.

Parents do not post in the cohort by default. Aisha made that call after the second weekend, when a well-meaning dad started chiming in with engineering advice that gently disagreed with hers. The cohort wall is now the team's record. Parents who want to talk to Aisha do so by private message.

What competition prep looks like now

Three weeks before any regional, Aisha reviews the build log for every pupil in the team. Each row is green for items the pupil has personally completed and shown to her, amber for items close to done, red for items not yet started. The pre-competition note to each parent then takes about a minute: "Daniel's gripper iteration is green; the research project section he leads is amber with the recommendation panel still to write; sparring at the practice scrimmage on Saturday is the one I want him to do twice more. We are on track and I am confident."

That sentence used to be a vibe and a colour-coded cell. It is now a record the pupil, parent and tutor all see.

Across the two competition cycles since Aisha moved to Bitir — autumn 2025 First Lego League regional, spring 2026 VEX IQ — the club has put forward sixteen pupils across both qualifying competitions. Thirteen of them qualified to the next round. The three who did not were on the VEX squad whose robot's lift mechanism failed a stress test the Tuesday before; Aisha would have entered a backup design in hindsight.

Results after one year on Bitir

The qualification number is the one that lights up the room when Aisha shares it. The attendance number is the one that pays the rent on the room. The WhatsApp number is the one her evenings noticed first.

A small surprise: home-build tick-off rates landed at 73% in the first term and have stayed there. Aisha had braced for less. She thinks the credit is two things. The task is always three lines — never more — and the pupil and the parent see the same task in the same place. The pattern matches the design choices documented in our seven assignment-design patterns guide, which she found, she says, after the fact.

What she would tell another after-school club

• Do not digitise the whole programme on day one. Start with one competition team and three milestone items; tick them off live from the club bench, and add the rest only when the habit holds.
• Hide the chat. A team cohort with parent chat enabled becomes a parent forum within a fortnight, and that is not what the cohort is for.
• Take attendance at the door, not at the end. A four-second tap on the way in costs nothing; doing it from memory at 17:30 costs you a regional qualifier.
• Post the pre-competition note three weeks out, not the week before. A parent who knows on a Tuesday that their child is on track sleeps fine through competition week, and so do you.

What Aisha does in Bitir

• One private cohort per competition team — Govan Rovers, Clyde Coders, CREST Crew, VEX IQ Yard.
• Per-pupil competition goal with the build log — lead programmer, chassis, gripper, research poster — each tickable item-by-item from the club bench.
• Door attendance scan — one tap per pupil on arrival, no paper register.
• Sunday-evening three-line home-build assignment — same shape every week, posted before tea.
• Pre-competition readiness note — per pupil, sent three weeks before each regional.
• Private parent messages — for everything that does not belong on the team's record wall.

Related reading: the 30 weekly check-in questions coaching groups actually answer, and progress tracking for coaching groups: what to measure and how.