Dr. Stephanie Valentine is an Associate Professor of Practice in Computer Science in the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management and the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her work sits at the intersection of computer science education, alternative grading and assessment, curriculum design, educational technology, software engineering, leadership, and technology entrepreneurship. At the Raikes School, she teaches and mentors students across computer science, leadership, entrepreneurship, and software product development.

Valentine is also the Founder and CEO of TeachFront, an educational technology company developing infrastructure for alternative grading and objective-centered assessment. TeachFront grew directly from her teaching practice: as Valentine moved her courses away from points and toward objective-level evidence, feedback, and reassessment, she found that conventional learning management systems were poorly suited to representing how student understanding develops over time. TeachFront builds tools around that evolving story of learning, including objective-level assessment, proficiency schemes, rich and reusable feedback, reassessment workflows, and student-facing representations of learning progress. Her work with TeachFront extends a broader interest in how the technical systems educators use shape what instructors are able to do pedagogically and what students come to understand assessment is for.

Valentine has played a substantial role in curriculum design and academic leadership at the Raikes School. She has redesigned all four courses in the school's core computer science sequence, co-led the redesign of its three-course leadership sequence, redesigned assessment across the four-semester Design Studio capstone sequence, and created the upper-level course RAIK 453H: Honors User Interfaces. From 2017 to 2026, she also served as the Raikes School's Assistant Director of Academics, with responsibilities spanning curriculum development and approval, faculty governance, academic policy, course scheduling, and the day-to-day administration of academic affairs.

Valentine's teaching combines high expectations with room for error, revision, and continued learning. She expects students to engage deeply with difficult work and ultimately demonstrate substantial proficiency, while designing learning environments in which being wrong along the way is useful rather than permanently punitive. Her courses make extensive use of active and collaborative learning, explicit learning objectives, rich feedback, opportunities for reassessment, and assessment based on demonstrated learning rather than the accumulation of points. She describes responsibility for learning as shared: students are responsible for actively and effortfully engaging in learning, while instructors are responsible for creating environments and opportunities in which that learning can occur.

A central thread in Valentine's current work is the idea that assessment systems do more than measure student behavior; they help create it. Students make rational choices within the systems educators construct. Grading and assessment therefore influence risk-taking, help-seeking, collaboration, experimentation, persistence, perfectionism, and students' willingness to attempt work they may not immediately do well. Her teaching, writing, and educational technology work examine what happens when assessment is designed to communicate learning and guide future growth rather than primarily to account for points lost and earned.

Before turning her scholarly attention primarily toward teaching, curriculum, and assessment, Valentine conducted research in human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, educational technology, sketch recognition, and child-computer interaction. She was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Sketch Recognition Lab at Texas A&M University, where her work included intelligent educational interfaces capable of interpreting hand-drawn student work and research into children's participation, identity, and social behavior in online social networks. Her doctoral dissertation, Design, Deployment, Identity, & Conformity: An Analysis of Children's Online Social Networks, examined the design and deployment of online social environments for children.

Valentine holds an MBA from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (2026), a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University (2016), and a B.A. in Computer Science with a minor in Electronic Publishing from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota (2011). Her graduate work in business emphasized leadership and influential communication, complementing her technical background and her work at the Raikes School's intersection of computing, business, leadership, and innovation. Her Ph.D. research areas included human-computer interaction, child-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.

Valentine's teaching and mentoring have been recognized with the UNL College Distinguished Teaching Award, the Holling Family Master Teacher Award, the Student Choice Outstanding Teaching Award, and recognition from the UNL Honors Program, Mortar Board, Omicron Delta Kappa, students, and parents. She was also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow.

Teaching

RAIK 183H: Honors Computer Science Essentials — The first computer science course in the Raikes School curriculum and one of Valentine's primary sites for experimentation with computer science pedagogy and alternative assessment. She comprehensively redesigned the course, including its learning objectives, policies, pedagogies, assessments, assignments, and supporting technologies. The course introduces computational problem solving and programming while developing foundations in object-oriented design, software engineering practices, algorithms, recursion, data structures, databases, discrete structures, propositional logic, testing, and professional code development. Its assessment system is organized around learning objectives rather than primarily around points: students receive information about their demonstrated proficiency on individual objectives, use feedback to identify gaps and misconceptions, and have opportunities to provide additional evidence as their understanding develops.

RAIK 185H: Honors Foundations of Leadership I — Leadership is a practice that students can study, test, reflect upon, and deliberately improve. The course explores personal strengths and weaknesses, values, communication, feedback, empathy, leadership styles, leading under pressure, resilience, mentorship, and lifelong development. Students learn through experiential activities as well as reflection, including simulations, workshops on giving and receiving feedback, collaborative exercises, interviews, and an iFail podcast assignment in which students examine experiences with failure and what those experiences reveal about growth, self-awareness, and leadership. Valentine previously co-led, with Dr. Robert Mackalski, a comprehensive redesign of the Raikes School's three-course leadership curriculum. Their work included defining program and course learning objectives and designing new pedagogies and assessments around those objectives.

RAIK401H/402H/403H/404H: Startup Studio — Draws together product development, technical feasibility, user needs, business strategy, communication, and the uncertainty inherent in creating something that does not yet exist. Her approach to entrepreneurship is closely connected to her teaching elsewhere in the Raikes School curriculum: students learn by making consequential decisions with incomplete information, testing assumptions, receiving evidence that some of those assumptions were wrong, and deciding intelligently what to do next. Her own experience founding TeachFront provides an additional bridge between academic entrepreneurship and the practical work of developing, funding, securing, and bringing an educational technology product to market.

RAIK401H/402H/403H/404H: Raikes School Design Studio — is the school's multi-semester, industry-sponsored software development capstone, in which students work with real clients to design and deliver software products. Valentine has mentored more than 50 Design Studio teams, representing approximately 250 students, on projects for organizations including Microsoft, Gallup, Nelnet, and TD Ameritrade. Her mentorship has included software engineering, client communication, requirements elicitation, prioritization, product development, release and handoff, project leadership, and team dynamics. Her involvement in Design Studio has also extended beyond individual project teams to program-level curriculum and assessment design. She redesigned the assessment scheme used across the four-course Design Studio sequence, bringing the same objective-centered attention to learning and feedback that she uses elsewhere in her teaching to the complexities of collaborative, client-facing project work.

Previously Taught and Developed Courses

RAIK 184H: Honors Software Development Essentials —Valentine comprehensively redesigned the second course in the Raikes School computer science core, including its objectives, policies, pedagogies, assessments, and instructional technologies.

RAIK 283H: Honors Software Engineering III — A data structures and algorithms course with a software engineering emphasis. Valentine redesigned the course with mentorship from faculty in the UNL Department of Computer Science and Engineering and taught it for three semesters.

RAIK 284H: Honors Software Engineering IV — Valentine contributed to a comprehensive redesign of this pragmatic software engineering course, including its learning objectives, policies, pedagogies, and assessments.

RAIK 453H: Honors User Interfaces — An upper-level course in user interface design and human-computer interaction that Valentine proposed, designed, developed, and led through the university curricular approval process.

Curriculum and Academic Leadership

Raikes School Computer Science Core

Valentine has redesigned or co-redesigned all four courses in the Raikes School's core computer science sequence. Her curriculum design work encompasses not only course content, but also learning objectives, sequencing, pedagogical approaches, assessment, assignments, course policies, instructional technologies, and the relationships among courses across the curriculum.

Raikes School Leadership Curriculum

With Robert Mackalski, Valentine co-led the redesign of the Raikes School's three-course leadership sequence. The work began at the program level, identifying what Raikes graduates should understand and be able to do as leaders, and worked backward from those outcomes into course objectives, learning experiences, and assessment.

Design Studio Assessment

Valentine redesigned assessment for the Raikes School's four-semester Design Studio sequence. The work addressed an unusually complicated assessment environment in which individual student learning occurs inside collaborative teams producing real software for external clients. The resulting approach placed greater emphasis on transparent expectations, evidence of learning, student ownership, and meaningful conversations between teams and faculty mentors.

RAIK 453H: Honors User Interfaces

Valentine proposed, designed, developed, and shepherded through curricular approval an upper-level course in user interfaces, drawing on her research background in human-computer interaction and interface design.

Assistant Director of Academics, 2017–2026

Valentine served as Assistant Director of Academics for the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management from 2017 to 2026.

Her responsibilities included faculty leadership and governance, curriculum management and approval, academic policy, course scheduling, coordination with other academic units, and the day-to-day administration of academic affairs. In that role, she chaired faculty and curriculum meetings, advocated for faculty governance structures, developed an annual evaluation framework designed to better represent the work of professors of practice, and represented faculty needs within the administration of the school.

TeachFront and Alternative Grading

Valentine is the Founder and CEO of TeachFront, an educational technology company building infrastructure for alternative grading.

TeachFront began with a classroom problem. As Valentine's courses moved from conventional points-based grading toward objective-level evidence of learning, feedback, and reassessment, the software infrastructure around those courses increasingly became the limiting factor. A conventional gradebook can represent that a student earned 37 out of 50 points on an assignment. It is much less capable of representing that the student initially struggled with recursion, later demonstrated proficiency, continues to have a misconception about object-oriented design, revised a separate piece of work after feedback, and has now produced new evidence that changes what the instructor knows about their learning.

TeachFront is designed around that second problem.

The platform grew out of tools Valentine and her students built to support her own alternative-grading courses, eventually becoming a standalone educational technology company. TeachFront is designed to support objective-level assessment, reusable feedback, proficiency schemes, reassessment workflows, and communication of student learning over time.

For Valentine, TeachFront and her academic work are not separate threads. Both ask essentially the same design question at different scales: what would educational systems look like if learning, rather than points, were the fundamental unit around which we built them?

Recent Writing and Public Scholarship

Valentine writes publicly about alternative grading, assessment, educational technology, student motivation, perfectionism, resilience, academic rigor, and the ways educational systems influence student behavior.

The “Points Are Insidious” Series

The “Points Are Insidious” Manifesto
2025
Develops Valentine's argument that points are not a neutral way of recording learning. Because students rationally optimize for the systems educators create, points can redirect attention toward accumulation and loss avoidance, changing how students respond to difficulty, feedback, collaboration, and error.

The “Points Are Insidious” Manifesto, Part II: Assessing at the Boiling Point
December 5, 2025
Examines what happens when the logic of points becomes embedded deeply enough in an educational system that attempts to improve learning are continually pulled back toward point accounting.

The “Points Are Insidious” Manifesto, Part III: Perfectionism Is Not Excellence
March 5, 2026
Examines the relationship among conventional grading, high achievement, perfectionism, intellectual risk-taking, and fragility among academically successful students. It explores how alternative grading can create room for ambitious students to take meaningful intellectual risks rather than continually protecting a record of near-perfect performance.

Additional articles by Valentine are available on her LinkedIn profile.

Media and Public Work

The Grading Podcast, Episode 142: “Please Harvard! Don't Get It Wrong This Time!! What's Wrong with a Cap on A's?”

March 31, 2026. Valentine joined Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley to discuss Harvard's proposed changes to grading, including the consequences of capping A grades and ranking students against one another. The conversation examines academic rigor, grade distributions, competition, perfectionism, collaboration, intellectual risk-taking, alternative grading, and the distinction between controlling grades and meaningfully assessing learning.

The Grading Podcast, Episode 127: “An LMS Designed from the Ground Up for Alt Grading? Tell Me More! With Stephanie Valentine”

December 16, 2025. Valentine discusses the evolution of her alternative-grading practice and the origin of TeachFront, including the difficulty of managing objective-level assessment and reassessment in spreadsheets and learning management systems designed around points and averages.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Selected Journal Articles

Valentine, S., & Hammond, T. (2016). An Analysis of Participation, Identity Conversations, and Social Networking Affordances on an Online Social Network for Children. Journal of Media Innovations, 3(1).

Crosby, R. W., Valentine, S., & Williams, T. L. (2014). Leveraging Programming Difficulty to Improve Understanding and Perceptions of Non-Majors. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 29(4), 27–35.

Atilola, O., Valentine, S., Kim, H., Turner, D., McTigue, E., Hammond, T., & Linsey, J. (2014). Mechanix: A Natural Sketch Interface Tool for Teaching Truss Analysis and Free-Body Diagrams. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 28(2), 169–192.

Valentine, S., Vides, F., Lucchese, G., Turner, D., Kim, H., Li, W., Linsey, J., & Hammond, T. (2012). Mechanix: A Sketch-Based Tutoring and Grading System for Free-Body Diagrams. AI Magazine, 34, 55.

Selected Books and Book Chapters

Hammond, T., Valentine, S., & Adler, A. (Eds.). (2016). Revolutionizing Education with Digital Ink. Springer International Publishing.

Valentine, S., Leyva-McMurtry, A., Borgos-Rodriguez, K., & Hammond, T. (2016). The Digital Sash: A Sketch-Based Badge System in a Social Network for Children. In Revolutionizing Education with Digital Ink, 179–189. Springer.

Hammond, T., Valentine, S., Adler, A., & Payton, M. (2015). The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education. Springer International Publishing.

Valentine, S., Lara-Garduno, R., Linsey, J., & Hammond, T. (2015). Mechanix: A Sketch-Based Tutoring System that Automatically Corrects Hand-Sketched Statics Homework. In The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education, 91–103. Springer.

Kim, H., Valentine, S., Taele, P., & Hammond, T. (2015). EasySketch: A Sketch-Based Educational Interface to Support Children's Self-Regulation and School Readiness. In The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education, 35–46. Springer.

Selected Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings

Parlante, N., Zelenski, J., Valentine, S., et al. (2022). Nifty Assignments. Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). Association for Computing Machinery.

Kim, H., Taele, P., Valentine, S., McTigue, E., & Hammond, T. (2013). KimCHI: A Sketch-Based Developmental Skill Classifier to Enhance Pen-Driven Educational Interfaces for Children. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling, 33–42. Association for Computing Machinery.

Valentine, S., Vides, F., Lucchese, G., Turner, D., Kim, H., Li, W., Linsey, J., & Hammond, T. (2012). Mechanix: A Sketch-Based Tutoring System for Statics Courses . Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

Field, M., Valentine, S., Linsey, J., & Hammond, T. (2011). Sketch Recognition Algorithms for Comparing Complex and Unpredictable Shapes. Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Honors and Awards

• UNL College Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2022.
• Holling Family Master Teacher Award, College of Engineering, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2022.
• Mortar Board Professor of the Month, Mortar Board Black Masque Chapter, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2021. Student nominated.
• Omicron Delta Kappa Faculty Inductee, ODK Nebraska Circle, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2020. Student nominated.
• Lavender Graduation Advocate Award, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2020. Student nominated.
• Outstanding Instructor in the Honors Program, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2019. Student nominated.
• UNL Parents Recognition Award, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2019. Parent nominated.
• Student Choice Outstanding Teaching Award, Lower Level, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 2018. Student nominated.
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation.

Education

Master of Business Administration (MBA), May 2026
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Areas of emphasis: Leadership and Influential Communication

Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2016
Texas A&M University
Areas of study: Human-Computer Interaction, Child-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence
Dissertation: Design, Deployment, Identity, & Conformity: An Analysis of Children's Online Social Networks
Advisor: Tracy Hammond

B.A. in Computer Science, 2011
Saint Mary's University of Minnesota
Minor: Electronic Publishing