A Beyond-the-Classroom Club
CompUTC is a club for encouraging community in the field of computer science and pushing education beyond the classroom. I acted on the CompUTC leadership board as event manager and git fanatic. The above picture is of me leading an Intro to Git Workshop for interested students, based on the curriculum built by MLH. The workshop was a fantastic event to kick off our 2019 Hacktoberfest drive. Following the event, we hosted biweekly hack nights to encourage members to find and fulfill hacktober-tagged pull requests. It was a great way to introduce students to git and incentivize them with a hacktoberfest t-Shirt (although not many people managed to get all four done)!
My main project in CompUTC was to upgrade the Mocs Arcade. The Mocs Arcade is a wooden arcade made exclusively for student-made games. It supports two sets of controllers and is built with a windows computer on the inside.
Before I began working on it, the arcade couldn't be left alone as it had no game launcher to use. In my sophomore year, I built a rudimentary game launcher in java. Unfortunately, due to several problems, this launcher could not be used long-term and a better verison had to be built. I recruited a team of seniors for their Senior Capstone Project (a one-semester group project) to make an upgraded game-launcher in C# with the .NET framework. Projects like this always intersted me, and I am honored to have taken part in this CompUTC tradition. The Mocs Arcade project helped me cement my love of software development, game design, and working with others. It is what taught me the importance of getting help, as well as knowing when to abandon an old project to make something better!
CompUTC is not just a speaker/project series, but also a club, so we work hard to create a sense of community with fun events twice a semester. We have started hosting an annual Minecraft night for members to create, destroy, and have fun in a remotely-hosted minecraft world. We always have a lot of fun, and the club bonds a lot as a result.
CompUTC is a club that pushes the department of computer science forward, encouraging students to round off their education through engagement and experience. Through CompUTC, I have volunteered at the annual Scenic City Summit Conference, attended local Hackathons, led group workshops, managed emails and event dates, and made a lot more friends than I could have talking with classmates. CompUTC helped me explore the field of computer science and discover what I love about this field, and what I want to do in it.
Projects and Technologies we brought to students include:
Along with leading several events, I often went to on-campus events hosted through the Think&Achieve program to expand my horizons so as to be a better organizer. Some events I went to include: