So 5 of our most prominent officers are graduating in two weeks and I’ll be stepping down as ACM President next semester to focus on graduating, so I created this video montage as kind of a tribute to the movers-and-shakers and to say goodbye:

As I was going through all my old photos and videos, it occurred to me that we are probably the most awesome ACM Chapter in existence! Here’s a quick list why:

• ICFP Programming Contest: (see my article for a full write-up) The International Conference on Fuctional Programming’s Programming Competition. It’s a worldwide codefest that starts on Friday at noon and goes until 8am Sunday morning: A caffeine-fueled incredibly fun weekend of coding! We were tasked to design a Mars Rover that could do quick and efficient crater & alien avoidance. Our debug messages were featured in the video: “OMG WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE” or something similar
• The NAU ACM Game Cabinet: From the ground up, we built an arcade cabinet to feature only NAU Student-created video games. It’s now being housed in the front area entrace to the Engineering building and gives the experience of actually playing this game in the arcade.
• DEFCON16: Our yearly tradition here at NAU ACM is to hop in a caravan together and drive to Las Vegas to attend one of the largest computer security conferences in the world: DEFCON. (See my previous post on DEFCON) One of our members, Bryce Bearchell, won the Open Capture the Flag competition in 2008 and now struts around with the coveted “Black Badge”. Another very prominent member, Michael Brooks, was a speaker and gave two different presentations.
• The NAU ACM Robotics Projects: We’re currently building two different robots:
  • Our “ground” unit, Gauis, will autonomously navigate the Engineering building
  • Our “air” unit, which will be a blimp, we’ll fly around in the SkyDome and take to Science Day, etc.
• ACM-ICPC2008: The International Collegiate Programming Contest. We caravaned down to Tucson together to compete at the UofA against all other colleges in the Rocky Mountain area. From the video, you can see we flew our massive pirate flag in our workspace…LOL!
• Digital Carnivals (w/Custom Scoring Software): Digital Carnivals are our unique take on LAN Parties. Oh yes, we had an all-night code party to write automatic tournament ranking & scoring software for our first LAN Party, which we’ve dubbed Digital Carnivals. Since that first one, we’ve grown to enourmous size, with corporate sponsorship and three different large grants for hosting our events.