Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

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...

Video chat side channel in a remote class (or an experiment not good enough to keep) Talking about failure is hard. Talking about an experiment that didn’t completely fail but didn’t wholly succeed, is something that I could easily “sweep under the rug.” However, I think it’s important to share the good, the bad, and the ugly. It shows we are human and no one is perfect. Moreover, for this particular experiment, I could see myself rationalizing trying again, and I want to make sure I remember the lessons I learned. In Spring 2021, when we were teaching our CS2 class fully remote due to covid-19, I had a crazy idea. What if we gave students a second video chat outside the lecture Zoom meeting? What if we used this video side channel to simulate the “talk to your neighbor” practice that I used a lot in my lecture teaching? It did not go as well as I had imagined, and this blog post is a reflection on why we did it, how things went, and what we did when things weren’t working. [Also p...