I'm Charles Martin.

This post is about a new course template I designed and have been using for my teaching at ANU. The idea is to author lectures, tutorials, and class resources in Markdown and then have files automatically converted to PDF and HTML and arranged in a simple website to share with students and colleagues.

I’ve just wrapped up five training sessions for around 130 tutors (small group teachers) across the College of Systems and Society: two full-day sessions for new starters and three two-hour refresher sessions for returning tutors (and there’s one extra session to come for late-comers). It’s an exhausting but rewarding process. I’ve now been reflecting on our tutor’s needs and how we can activate their knowledge and experience to provide a better student experience across our College.

In June 2025, I hosted the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference at ANU in Canberra, and served as a general chair along with Pia van Gelder from the ANU School of Art and Design. In this post I want to talk a bit about the kind of conference we produced, discuss (brag about) what we achieved and thank everybody who contributed. Along the way, I have images from a few conference highlights.

I had an amazing weekend performing at SoundOut 2026 at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery performing with some incredible Australian and international musicians. SoundOut is described as “one of the gateway exploratory music-art events in Australia” and a gem in Canberra’s yearly music schedule.

Human-computer interaction is one of the most genuinely interdisciplinary fields in computing. It asks students to move between user experience theory, design practice, empirical research, and reflective communication — often within a single project. This semester I completed a major redesign of COMP3900/6390, ANU’s undergraduate and postgraduate introductory HCI course, with a clear goal: to scaffold all the core skills of HCI research so that every student who finishes the course has actually done HCI, not just read about it.

The first of our smcclablive concerts was held at the Peter Karmel Building Big Band Room on 7 November 2025. Works were presented from researchers and students in the ANU SMCClab with guests Charlie Roberts from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA) and Ben Swift from the ANU School of Cybernetics.