Recent advances in coherent spin shuttling have made sparse semiconductor spin-qubit arrays an appealing solid-state platform to realize quantum processors1–7. The dynamic and long-range connectivity enabled by shuttling is also essential for many quantum error-correction schemes8–10. Here we demonstrate a silicon spin-qubit device comprising a shuttling bus for coherently transporting qubits that can interact at four isolated locations that we call bus stops. We dynamically populate the array and tune all single- and two-qubit operations using shuttling and quantum non-demolition spin measurements, without access to charge sensing in most of the device. We achieve universal control of the effective five-qubit processor and select the connectivity required to form a surface-code stabilizer plaquette that supports X- and Z-type parity checks up to weight four. We use the parity checks to generate multi-qubit entanglement between all qubit combinations in the array and report the genuine entanglement of a five-qubit Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger state, constituting one of the largest such states constructed with gate-defined semiconductor spins. The protocols developed here lay the groundwork for modular calibration and operation of sparse spin-qubit arrays, and we highlight the feasibility of near-term quantum error-correction experiments with mobile spin qubits.