Club Spotlight: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

The Association for Computing Machinery, also known as the ACM club, is a club available to all Rowan students, regardless of major. The club primarily focuses on computer science and coding, acting as a casual space for students to explore potential passions in computer science. 

The club is presided over by student president Frank Nemeth, Brandon McHenry as the treasurer, with professor Darren Provine acting as general advisor. The ACM club meets every Friday at 3pm, holding sessions in the Business Hall in room 121. The club meets weekly to create projects, such as websites, video games, and robotics. Guest speakers from within the computer science industry also drop in, but the premiere activity of the club is the ACM Game Jams.
Game Jams are events within the club where students make small-scale videogames outside of class to present to the club. Using methods learned either in class or outside of class, these game jams serve as a culmination of programing know-how, allowing students to apply their learning in a non-academic setting. The club’s Halloween featured not only pizza, cupcakes, and candy, but also Halloween themed mini-games. 

McHenry’s game was a zombie survival game. The player fought against zombies which spawned in three hordes; the aim of the game was to eliminate all zombies while avoiding death. The game was developed in C#, McHenry utilizing a 3-D isometric model for its graphics. The entire project took around 2 days to complete. The zombies store reference to the player character, comparing their position to that of the player, and then moving towards the player when necessary. Each round, McHenry set the zombies to spawn at random times and locations, all with different speeds. 

The other game presented at Game Night was a re-working of Wordle. The goal of Wordle is to guess a five letter word in six rounds. Per guess, a player man figures out the letters and letter placement of the word. “The Wordle takes guesses as inputs from the users. It then checks the guesses to ensure that they are valid words and they contain alphabetical characters or numbers– no special characters,” says Michael Greenbaum, the creator. The game then composes your guess to the correct word and displays 0s, 1s, and 2,s to indicate the correctness of characters in your guess. Wordles does this by highlighting the letters in colors.

After each game was shown, students were able to play pre-existing games they brought in, video games and board games alike. 

ACM Club is a golden opportunity for students interested in coding to dip their feet into the subject. Whether students want a casual or more advanced experience, all our welcome. 

Written by Kiley Parker |  Posted 2022.11.17