This week, Greg and Dorinda Beeley of LightSys (http://lightsys.org/) presented on how God can use technology to forward His Kingdom, and how we can get involved! We were reminded that whether we are trapped in a lion’s den or upgrading an email server, we still need God’s direction, since the final product is not simply getting out of the lion’s den or getting the email server fixed; the final product is forwarding His Kingdom. Finally, they showed us their Centrallix application platform and the Kardia software that runs on it that is being used to benefit missions groups by providing an affordable finance tracking system!
Thanks to LightSys for a great presentation this week! God bless!
This past week, Dr. Rust Baldwin from AFIT (the Air Force Institute of Technology) was able to come to visit LeTourneau University and present to ACM! He told us more about the graduate opportunities offered at AFIT, as well as a few undergraduate possibilities as well! In addition, he offered advice for entering the professional career field of Cyber Warrior – a new role that is becoming increasingly important in the US and around the world!
What was most enjoyable about his presentation was probably the description of how AFIT students would post taunts to the NSA as the NSA attempted to hack their network in a security test. Truly, the re-dubbing of Hitler’s despair will never truly die while AFIT is alive…
It appears that we have indeed selected the theme for ACM@LETU’s Spring 2012 semester: Game Development!
As someone inconsequential (I think his name was Dagger or something…) once said, “Developing games is not for the weak haired!” I guess this needs a bit of explanation. The point is, you are going to try to rip your hair out plenty of times while you try to make a game. Don’t get me wrong: games are fun to make, and they are especially fun to play, but they are also hard to make. A wide range of technologies goes into making a good game: graphics, artificial intelligence (pathfinding, finite state machines, and often way more than this), physics, input/output, and networking are just a few of the subjects that are needed all the time in the game development world! Putting them together in a fun way is a challenge, or perhaps a game in itself, if you choose to look at it that way!
This theme was chosen because of an upcoming activity happening near the end of the semester: Ludum Dare. (More likely, the Jam associated with it.) The competition takes place sometime in April, though the final date is currently undecided. The prize for this competition is the game you and your team create in the time you are given (3 days in the Jam), experience, and a small amount of recognition! This low-stress competition should be a perfect place for us to band up and have a great time as an ACM chapter!
This Friday, Joseph Wallace (Mr. President) presented on the programming language Lua. This presentation was brought about in honor of the recent release of Lua 5.2. In this presentation, we learned the Lua basics and then went into overriding global variables, creating tables and using metatables on them, emulating object-oriented style programming, and more!
At some point during the presentation, I realized that not everyone has the same idea about what the Firefox logo is… According to some, it is a red panda, while according to others, it is just a fox. (Well, OK, I still think it it is a hippo…)
Welcome to the home of LeTourneau ACM. We are not finished yet, but we hope to soon have pictures, PowerPoints from the presentations, announcements, a calendar, and a list of current student projects and opportunities to get involved.
This is where we hope you will let us know what topics you would like to see covered in an ACM presentation. If you would like to present in an ACM presentation, please send us an email at: letourneauacm@gmail.com