Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

 Generative AI (GenAI) exploded into the academic teaching landscape in 2021, and we have been coping ever since. I’ve been quietly thinking about it since then. I’ve shared resources via my podcast’s social media feeds ( Twitter/X , Facebook , Patreon , YouTube ) and my LinkedIn . But I have not written about it here on my blog nor created a podcast episode focusing on it. [ Also posted on medium. ] I haven’t posted anything about my personal opinion because I wanted to provide an informed one, and I prefer to do my thinking quietly. However, it’s been long enough, and the landscape keeps changing, so I think it’s worth saying something. By posting something, I hope to try to move beyond the initial “what do we do?” conversations. These conversations are the ones I feel like I keep having. And my response/conversation now is often about the same terms and frameworks that I’ve been saying for a while, which often signals to me that it’s time to write a blog post. So here are my cu...

 When it comes to anyone’s advice on how to run your own course, your “mileage may vary.” So, I thought it would be interesting to revisit my series on how I organize my teaching staff in my 200+ student class . The first post of that series is my most viewed post on Medium. I published that series during the second half of 2020, and times have changed since then (**cough** pandemic **cough**). In addition, I’ve moved on from that introductory computer science (CS1), and I primarily teach an elective data science (DS) course, which has a high variability in enrollment. In this post, I revisit that series from the perspective of what I still do versus do not between my CS1 and DS courses. [ Also posted on medium. ] Current Course’s Context Before I start my comparison, I need to go over how the context is different since it influenced many of the differences between the two courses. My DS class has a semester-long project and no labs/discussions. The class also uses Python, whi...

An underlying current in my blog post series on how I manage the teaching staff for my 200+ student CS1 class is that teaching large classes requires management skills. Notice I said skills because I fully believe we can all learn and improve how we manage people. The amount of effort required to learn a particular skill will, of course, vary. But that just means some of these may take work and require conscious effort to learn. Moreover, not all management techniques will work for you and the people you manage. [Also posted on medium .] I will say up front that I have no secret techniques for any of this. Most readers of this blog are also teachers, so you know there are few shortcuts to learning something. And these kinds of professional skills are rarely taught in academic settings, especially in preparation for becoming a professor. So instead, this blog post will focus on first my processes to learn new management ideas, skills, frameworks, and techniques. Then I'll go over s...

Time for a reflection on being the Hybrid Experience chair for SIGCSE TS 2023, a.k.a. round 2! This year was so much more manageable in terms of time commitment. I also helped introduce new processes and aspects to the symposium. In this post, I will start with the new processes and structures and then talk about the time commitment since the latter section references things from the former section. [Also posted on  medium .] New Processes and Structures The most significant difference is rather than being a committee of one, I was part of a committee of four! Dela Yazdansepas was my junior Hybrid Experience Co-Chair. Jacqueline Smith was the Authors’ Corner chair and Jessica Yauney was the Online Experience chair. Spreading both the workload and the mental load was extremely helpful and reduced so much of the stress. In addition, three other things. The first was to create a Trello Workspace for the committee. You all know I love my Trello boards ( class Trello blog post , pers...

It is important to have documentation for people to reference as they learn how to work in a team. One document I use when I'm onboarding a student onto one of my codebases is my GitHub Rules and Expectations. The basic idea is to give them a clear idea of how to interact with everyone when it comes to the codebase and step-by-step instructions on what to do in certain situations. Below is the current version of my document. And yes, the "Rationale for Rules" is a section under the rules, so the students understand why I'm asking them to follow the rules. [Also posted on  medium .] Rules The main branch is only for final work and has a clean commit history Do not directly commit to the main branch Work In Progress (WIP) branches Use these for all initial work Tiny commits on these branches are perfectly acceptable It is fine to use a WIP for a pull request (PR) if its commit history is clean. These can and should be pushed to the repo to have backups of work. Clear co...

I consistently teach over 200 students at a time. Therefore, I heavily rely on autograders and teaching assistants (TAs) to grade everything. I use and love Gradescope. But, like all interfaces, Gradescope is limited in the affordances of how to use it. So I thought I’d write a blog post on the logistics side of how I use Gradescope to manage my grading. This post will cover a mix of small and big effort things I do to handle the logistics of grading homeworks and exams. [Also posted on  medium .] The “Prof. Double Check” rubric For those unfamiliar with Gradescope, it enables hand grading via rubric items that TAs can check off to mark student work. Rubrics help make grading more consistent, and Gradescope automatically handles live rubric updates and multiple TAs grading the same problem. In turn, Gradescope shows summary statistics on these rubrics and allows filtering by a rubric. I take advantage of this feature by adding at the bottom a rubric called “Prof. Double Check,...