Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

I attended ITiCSE this year. One of my former undergraduate students, Anshul Shah, presented his paper on our CS1 reviewer app . Attending was an opportunity to iterate on how I approach online conferences and try out ideas from my last reflection when I attended SIGCSE 2021 . One way to describe my approach to ITiCSE is less like prior online conferences and more like how I approach in-person conferences . [Also posted on  medium .] How I decided what to do Step 1 : Look at the proceedings two-ish weeks before and note all of the things I find interesting.  — I did this based only on the titles. The abstracts hadn’t come out at the time. Step 2 : Go through the list a second time and mark which things I will actually attend.  — Talks were live, and the videos would not be available until after the conference. I often had more papers I was interested in than I had time for, so I needed to prioritize. I purposely separated this step from Step 1 because I didn’t want to get bo...

 ITiCSE 2021 is here! And this year, I’ve got a paper with Anshul Shah , Jonathan Liu , and Susan Rodger . The first two were undergraduate students. They are now both graduated and going on to grad school to study computer science education! Anshul is going to UCSD and Jonathan to Chicago . [Also posted on  medium .] The paper is “ The CS1 Reviewer App: Choose Your Own Adventure or Choose for Me! ” and is a tools paper. The paper introduces an app that Anshul originally developed with a partner in their Fall 2019 database class. We’ve been developing the app ever since with help from other undergraduate students through Duke’s summer CS+ program . Jonathan started helping last Fall. Below is a screenshot, the abstract, and a discussion of changes from the last six months since we submitted the paper. You can also check out the tool yourself at https://cs-reviewer.cs.duke.edu/ Abstract We present the CS1 Reviewer App — an online tool for an introductory Python course that all...

In the pre-covid pandemic times, I introduced a backchannel to my CS1 lecture using our class forum. And I’ve continued this practice ever since, including during the pandemic, remote teaching. This post discusses the why, the how, and what my students think of the backchannel. It also includes considerations if you are thinking of adding the practice to your own class. [Also posted on  medium .] For a little bit of history, I first tried creating a backchannel using a web chat app. This did not work. The students rarely used it. I think it was a combination of the app having some bugs and it being “yet another tool” that was part of the class’s rather large tool ecosystem. After that failed attempt, I switched to our class forum, Piazza . The class forum worked, and I’ve been using it even during the pandemic imposed remote teaching. Why? There are many reasons to add a lecture backchannel. For me, the biggest reason was lowering the barrier to ask a question. Asking a question in...

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...

As I said in an earlier post, I’ve decided to forgo new year’s resolutions this year and try The Theme System from CGP Grey and Myke Hurley . You can get an overview from CGP Grey’s video . This post is to discuss my theme and a quantified self deep dive. The deep dive is into some of my personal data as my first steps toward my theme. [Also posted on  medium .] Theme: Being Well-Rested My semester’s theme is “Being Well-Rested.” Despite being long, this theme resonates with me and has a bunch of stuff behind it. So bear with me. The biggest thing impacting this semester is this spring semester is going to be rough. It is my first time teaching entirely online from start to finish because I was on parental leave last fall. Technically I taught online when Covid-19 hit us mid-Spring 2020, but while I did work right up to my baby’s birth, I wasn’t the main person running things for most of the online part of Spring 2020. I made decisions on the transition, finished the teaching mat...

As the year draws to a close, it's that time of year to start thinking about new year resolutions. So I thought I'd write a quick post on what I'm currently contemplating about what I plan to do in hopes that it'll help others by raising awareness of an example of how to think of this. [Also posted on  medium .] First, I just discovered The Theme System  through a recent CGP Grey video . He created it with Myke Hurley , and they discuss it on their podcast Cortex , which I also just started listening to. My new year resolutions have been really stagnant the past few years, where I recycle them and mostly succeed at them. And yes, I know most research says people fail at new year resolutions, but I'm on the opposite side in the sense I pick ones that I know I can achieve. However, I've been reusing them the last few years out of fear if I don't make them my resolutions, I won't do them, and I want those things in my life. The Theme System , in short, is ...

This is also posted on medium . This is the last post of a 5 blog post series on how I organize the teaching staff for my 200+ student class. This post discusses how I run my weekly meeting with my head staff. The head staff is a subgroup of my teaching staff that helps me organize all the others. In this post, I discuss how I split the meeting into two phases to allow some head staff to leave when talking about topics that are not relevant to their responsibilities. I also include a discussion on what I do between meetings because that is just as important as what happens during. The other posts in this series are as follows (I’ll update with links as I post): Overview Teaching staff roles How I communicate with my teaching staff How I track the to-do list How I run the head staff meetings (You are here) Terminology Rather than require you to read my teaching staff roles post , here is a quick refresher: Teaching Associate (TA+)  — A full-time department staff member (not a student) a...