Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

My LLM brainstorming student activity was accepted to SIGCSE TS 2026 's Special Session ACM Generative AI Task Force Special Session: Teaching with Generative AI: Tools You Can Use Today . This special session asked the SIGCSE community to apply to present how they use generative AI (GenAI) in their teaching. Those accepted would then present what they do during the session. [ Also posted on Medium. ] This blog post is a companion piece to my presentation, so that people have more to reference than just my slides . It also includes all the nitty-gritty details people can use and copy-paste. Context But first context, because context matters! This is for my CompSci 216: Everything Data (here is the link to the Spring 2026 offering ; later links will also point to this semester's instance). It is a post-CS2 elective data science course with an average of 111 students over the last five semesters (Spring 2024 to Spring 2026). We are on the 15-week semester system, and it has a 4-...

 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...

A common tactic for better managing your workload is tracking how you spend your time. But what does that even mean? Most of what I’ve read explains it in a few brief sentences, which I find dissatisfying. There are so many ways to track your time, after all! [ Also posted on medium. ] So, here is how I track my time. And I’ll frame this blog post as a case study to help you think about what would work for you. I do not recommend starting by doing what I do because my process is the evolution of 10+ years of tracking. Moreover, I’m a data geek who loves to play with data. A simple piece of paper where you jot down start and end times can be good enough. This blog post is more for those who want something a bit more technical, like a spreadsheet that you can use to do some math for you and more easily analyze the results. Why do I track my time? Knowing why you are tracking your time is valuable framing to help you decide how you will do it. I track my time for three reasons: accoun...

 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...

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,...

After my side channel experiment that wasn't worth keeping, it's probably no surprise that I did yet another crazy experiment! This one has a bunch of the usual elements. A naive teacher with delusions of lots of energy who thought this was a good idea (that's me). A class structure for who that teacher (me) wants the students to be, not how typical human students would behave. This time I messed with the deadline structure in my CompSci216 class, Fall 2021. This class is data science for students that have finished a CS2 level course or have enough programming and statistics that they'll be able to make up for having less programming experience. [Also posted on medium .] I knew going in that it wasn't the greatest of ideas. But I also thought it was an experiment worth trying (just like the side channel experiment ). Moreover, I couldn't think of a way to change it to increase the likelihood of success, so I ran with the idea anyway. I again framed it to the s...