GT ACM

Hi again (for the last time),

A couple people have asked me for the minutes/notes from last night’s meeting since they weren’t able to make it, so I thought I’d go ahead and share them with everyone.

The most important point is that Roger Pincombe and Neiloy Mukerjee are the new co-coordinators (or whatever titles they select) of the program. Roger and Neiloy will probably reachable at topics@gtacm.org soon. Expect all future emails to come from them.

The major points below are the items as they appeared on the agenda, and the minor points are what we discussed and decided.

• Class Format and Scheduling
  • 1 class per week
  • 1 or 1.5 hours per class
  • Up to 5 weeks at most
  • Might avoid scheduling 6-7:30 PM on Tuesdays because of CS mentor meeting
  • Might avoid scheduling Wednesdays for fraternity meetings
  • Friday starting around 4PM, Saturday around 12PM-2PM, and Sunday evenings were agreed upon as the best times for this semester. (Things may change in the Fall due to football gamedays)
• Topic: Intro to PHP
  • Our first class will be an introduction to PHP, a very popular web programming language, taught by Blair Daly.
  • Blair is a former CS teaching assistant and has created multiple successful online communities.
  • This class will take place later this month or early Februrary
• Do you know anything that you’d like to teach?
  • Ajai knows a few people that he thinks would like to teach topics on Ruby (possibly on Rails) development, as well as a person that already teaches “How to not be a Social Media Douchebag” somewhere else
  • A couple of gaming strategy classes were mentioned as fun breaks from standard classes
    • Discussed limiting sillier classes to just a couple per semester
• Is there anything you’d like to learn that isn’t already in our scope of recruiting?
  • Not really. In previous meetings, surveys, and polls, it looks like we’ve gathered pretty much all the popular ideas.
• Patrick is graduating and moving away, so the program needs a new coordinator
  • Roger Pincombe and Neiloy Mukerjee both stepped up and decided that they might be most effective working together to spearhead the program. From here on out, all TechTopics information will most likely come from them, and all questions should be directed to them.
• We probably need a website, even if just a simple one, to manage registration and scheduling.
  • Ajai volunteered to do this. He plans to do it by adding some functionality to the current GTACM wordpress installation (gtacm.org)

Soon, we should have a mailing list ready for anyone that is interested in our TechTopics program.

We did not discuss this as in-depth, but we plan to have Kristin Marsicano, instructor in the College of Computing, teach a topic on Android Development soon as well. Hopefully, we’ll get it going as an immediate second class.

Anyway, that ends my time at Tech, and I hope you guys get this off to a great start this semester.

–
Patrick Eisenmann
Former TechTopics Coordinator
GT Association for Computing Machinery
gtacm.org