Chapman ACM Events - Part 1

[Joe Smith]

Since my school's been in session for a few months, I thought I'd start going through some of the different events we've held, and discuss what's worked and what hasn't so far. To follow along, see http://acm.chapman.edu/events

Lesson 1: Tools: Communication is key.

First, I want to point out our Google Calendar, web site, and acm-announce and acm-discuss mailing lists. I started out sending plain-text emails, but moved on to sending more "professional" looking emails, which seems to add a bit of pop.

Lesson 2: Movie Nights: Have fun too!

Our first, and so far most successful event, was our "back-to-school movie night." We showed Transformers, and had several professors show up, as well as about 20 students. It was a great night, and really helped bring everyone together. A few of the guys are going to bring in Rock Band next week, so hopefully that'll be a great jam session as well.

Lesson 3: Inspiration: Classroom topics

The next event was a CLI howto. It focused primarily on Cygwin, but I gave the presentation on my Ubuntu Linux laptop and touched on aspects of Mac OS X as well. The professor in this semester's Data Structures class requires students to compile their Java code under Cygwin, which I think is pretty awesome. Unfortunately, most students in the class have little to no experience with a terminal, so the professor and nearly the entire class showed up to figure out how to use everything. It's generally much better to learn things together than to have to slog through the muck of man pages.

Lesson 4: Inspiration: Cool uses of campus resources.

The Web Design and Development tutorial was actually pretty well received. I think that most students aren't aware how to set up a basic website, let alone the fact that they can. If your school has a rather cryptic method (or one that isn't well documented) for setting up a homepage, it might be a good idea for a few events. The students who attended the CLI tutorial were much  better prepared for this, as they had already mastered (more or less) the directory tree/basic commands. Also, knowing how to use your school's network's VPN would be useful to go over.

Lesson 5: Offloading Responsibility: Getting Help

Our first officer meeting was a bit of a bust. I was hoping that everyone would show up and be stoked to help out and share the load of setting up the club, but that was not really the case. I'm still not sure how to effectively get some of my friends to help take on some responsibility; it's definitely a work in progress. However, the Artificial Life presentation by William Heatley was awesome; it was the first event that I wasn't directly in charge of setting up and presenting for. I sent out a Facebook message to a bunch of my friends, calling on them to present at least once before finals week. Will quickly responded and was extremely enthusiastic. If you have any friends/classmates who are working on a cool presentation, they're a great resource as well. It generates discussion, and helps everyone get a better feel for each other.

I hope that's helped, anyone else have some tips/ideas?

Joe Smith
Student Network Technician
Chapman University IS&T