We will very shortly be raising money for our club treasury with a Krispy Kremes fundraiser. We willl start pre-selling as soon as we set a pick-up date for the donuts.

These tasty morsels will be coming from the Krispy Kreme factory in Scranton.

Money is power. If we want to take a nice field trip to a gaming convention or technology show, we need a fatter wallet.

Professor Alfredo Jimenez (Mathematics) is presenting a flash-based learning module to the Mathematical Association of America. He wants a few students to help him refine and further develop his idea to present at the Undergraduate Research Fair in April.

Using Flash and Actionscript, Professor Jimenez created a program that eliminates the need for textbooks for his math students.

"A math textbook is $110 and we use about, say, 5 chapters from it," says the professor, "It's a big waste of money."

Students can download and use his programs to learn and master mathematical concepts. There is no doubt that his program can be expanded to encompass an infinite number of subject areas including basic algebra, trigonometry and calculus.

A visual explanation is proven to be more effective by a factor of 3 in many cases than reading out of a textbook.

If you want to earn 1 credit for research with Professor Jimenez, contact him via his Penn State e-mail: jaj4@psu.edu.

The spring semester is starting next week and our weekly meetings will start again.

The date and time of the meetings will be announced once club members become settled with their class schedules. So sit tight and wait until the next announcement.

We are waiting to hear back from the administration at Penn State about the status of our spring field trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California.

Also, our club needs to work out how we want to proceed with the meetings this semester. I want guest speakers and even more educational seminars. Also, we need to discuss ways to utilize our club office and equipment. We wouldn't want the expensive equipment purchased with school funds going to waste.

Over the winter break I studied topics such as Search Engine Optimization and Internet Affiliate Marketing, so I want to share the knowledge with the rest of the members.

We registered a free domain name with www.dot.tk. You can now access this site by typing in http://www.hazletonist.tk, which is much shorter and easier to remember than http://clubs.psu.edu/hn/ist

Register yourself now at the new club forums at http://clubs.psu.edu/hn/ist/forums From now on we will be using the above vBulletin software instead of Penn State's ANGEL system.

XMGfree.com is hosting our database for the forums. They also provide free web hosting, so check them out if you want some free megabytes.