ACM Design President

What is ACM?

Here at California State University, Fullerton have a chapter club for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) organization. But what is it? Well we are the largest computer science club on campus with over one-thousand members and host consistent weekly workshops covering various subfields in the field. One of these subfields was known as Design, the team in which I organized to produce biweekly interactive UI/UX and front-end web development workshops. More information about the club can be found at acmcsuf.com.

Workshops

Below are just the workshops I managed to produce with my team so that we can expose varying levels in knowledge the creative aspect in computer science.

Figma Basics

The kickoff workshop to show what ACM Design was about, and more importantly exposing people to the popular tool Figma. We demonstrated the real world application of Figma and even the silly little things we use it for such as our mascot and social media advertisement.

CSS Grid

Probably our densest workshop yet and one to learn from, an event to learn the fundamentals of CSS Grid. This workshop was more lecture based which we learned to be the weakest teaching structure. While we got the point across this event taught us to pivot and refine in the way we taught.

Build Your Brand

Another Figma based workshop we had it more group and activity based unlike the previous workshop. The goal of this workshop was to practice using the tool Figma in creating logos for their personality. We deep dived into the creative process of constructing branding for themselves. But that was not all, we finished the event by giving them a made-up company with branding requirements for them to treat as a real client. Below demonstrates what one group managed to create in less than thirty minutes.

CSS Animations

Unlike the previous lecture based CSS workshop, my team and I formulated this workshop around a CodePen activity. From this they would learn by failing about how transistions and animations are applied to css classes. After a small talk about the css properties, and the CodePen activity I created a group based activity in Replit. Following the logic from the previous workshop, this Replit was a “real” website that lacked flair. Their goal was to apply what they had learned up to that point and give a boring website neat CSS animations. Overall, this was a successful workshop that my team and I managed to create which will be used as reference for the future.

3D Websites Done Easy

This final workshop for the semester was the icing on the cake because I teased this one from the beginning of the semester. This workshop was actually inspired from amongus in 3D project. I go over in that page why I thought this was a good idea but it goes without saying how cool 3D websites are. In the end, this was a workshop worth remembering because I knew that my team and I created something these new people in computer science might not ever learn in their careers.

Additional Contributions

This club gave me the ability to grow as a developer and even as a person, I would give it my life to protect this community so that others can experience the same. I went out of my way to contribute to the club by:

Creating over fourty social media advertisements for the club’s Instagram account. These would be posted weekly to show our club memebers what laid before them for that week.

I additionally pushed and contributed in a complete club redesign for the website and the way we present ourselves. As this publishes, it is still in active development and as soon as it hits production more information can be found at alancortez.dev/projects.