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-...

A shared inbox was a tool I started using when I was the hybrid chair of the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. It was extremely useful then, and I have since incorporated it into my teaching processes. So, this blog post covers why I use a shared inbox, considerations when using one, and two case studies of how those considerations played out. [ Also posted on medium. ] Why use a shared inbox? In short, efficiency! If more than one person in a group can respond to an email, the speed of response goes up while no one repeats work. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve seen multiple people get an email and respond simultaneously. Or I’ve been that person who started writing and thankfully didn’t send it before the other person hit send! But there are more efficiency gains than just that! There’s clarity on the context, on who is responsible, and in the email responses themselves. If the entire email thread is in the shared inbox, everyone has access to that context, and no one has to find an...

I thought I’d go back to the SIGCSE TS theme for this blog post, but with one of my conference reflections. Though it’s not really one of my classic reflections since this was my first hybrid conference ever, and I was also creating the hybrid experience! I also attended the hybrid Learning@Scale and ICER conferences as an online attendee. Hopefully, I’ll find time to write reflections for those too. But first, SIGCSE TS 2022 because it’s better late than never! [Also posted on  medium .] What Happened Responsibility mainly drove the sessions I attended rather than interest. During the pre-symposium on Wednesday, I attended an all-morning Peer Teaching Summit that I helped organize. The focus is on facilitating discussion among college teachers about undergrad teaching assistants (UTAs). We also had UTAs present to contribute. During the symposium, I was a panelist on “Technology we can’t live without! (Covid-19 edition).” I attended one special session as an attendee just out of ...

 The Authors’ Corner was the brainchild of a SIGCSE TS 2022’s chairs meeting. By the time we articulated the idea, I didn’t know who contributed what to create it. The event aimed to enable authors to answer questions about their work online. The Authors’ Corner was primarily for online attendees and authors. [Also posted on  medium .] However, once we decided to do it, I said it had to be something where no one was left alone in a video call, “sitting in a black void,” waiting for someone to appear. The in-person equivalent event was presenters at posters or tables; if someone was interested in the project, they could talk to the presenter. However, the online versions of this I’ve participated in as a presenter and attendee put presenters in a video call alone, where they sat in a “black hole,” hoping someone would come and talk to them. Such events often make presenters feel insignificant and “unpopular” if no one comes, or maybe that’s just me. I refused to put our present...

  Hybrid Conference: Questions to think through Here is the first in my reflection series on running our first hybrid SIGCSE TS 2022 . In this post, I’ll cover a more organized version of the questions I’ve sent to those who’ve emailed me directly about running a hybrid conference. I did my best to cluster them so it isn’t an overwhelming laundry list of questions. But, to be honest, it is still an overwhelming list. Hopefully, the added context and extra ideas will help. Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. [Also posted on  medium .] This post is broken down into the following sections: Overall Experience (5 questions) Nuts and Bolts (3 questions) Videos? (2 questions) Hiring Help (2 kinds) Platform (1 question) Overall Experience (5 questions) Question 1: What kind of interaction/experience do you imagine for the hybrid piece? One person’s hybrid will not be another person’s since we have all experienced it differently. The organizers must be all on the same page. The only ...

So this past March, I was the inaugural Hybrid Experience Chair for the 2022 SIGCSE Technical Symposium . This conference is the Special Interest Group Computer Science Education’s (SIGCSE) flagship conference with over 1,500 attendees. My career plans included serving on committees like this. However, I hadn’t planned to volunteer for such committees until my kids were older and starting in a much smaller role. [Also posted on medium .] But when I got the call, I couldn’t say no. Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic started, I’ve been talking about how we can’t go back to pre-covid times as we glacially return to some new normal. In-person conferences are exclusionary. I experienced that first hand with SIGCSE TS 2020, the conference that didn’t happen due to the pandemic. I was eight months pregnant at the time of that conference and therefore couldn’t travel. So I had to remove my name from a submission because it required attendance. I supported my co-authors but couldn’t actually go a...

The SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2021 happened! So that means it’s time for a conference reflection. However, this blog post is going to be a little different. I’m going to try writing a letter to my future self focusing on how the conference went and how I can do online conferences better in the future. [Also posted on  medium .] Dear Future Self, So you are planning to attend another online conference. And I know there are online conferences in your future because you got a paper accepted to ITiCSE . And then ICER and Grace Hopper are both online (Wow, writing that makes me realize that we attend more conferences than I thought.). You’ve done a few online conferences now, so it’s time to remember what happened last time and learn the lessons from them. We don’t want to repeat the “I’m up to my eyeballs in work!” experience. Especially considering we wrote an entire blog post about attending two conferences at once, ICER and Learning@Scale (are we going to Learning@Scale this ye...

So given what did and did not go well, this section outlines three things that will hopefully make things better next time. The first is an overarching career task that will help me articulate my priorities, which will help me make decisions more quickly. The second is my first attempt at a travel routine that will hopefully help me better sustain myself both during and after an event. And the third is my plan on how to prepare for conferences, so I get the most out of them. Articulate my "Professor Platform" To help me prioritize and quickly assess an opportunity, I want to think on my "Professor Platform." I got this idea from "The Professor is In: The Essential Guide To Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job" by Karen Kelsky . I read this book when I was job hunting. It describes the need to create a "Campaign Platform" to help frame how to present yourself to search committees. Moreover, it helps you have a set of "things about you" you c...