Draft Report of the SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in the Liberal Arts
The SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in the Liberal Arts seeks to identify distinctive needs of liberal arts computing educators, and to suggest ways of addressing those needs. This session will be the initial presentation of the Committee's findings and recommendations, and a chance for the community to comment on the results prior to our final written report. The Committee found considerable variety among liberal arts computing programs, but enough common features to consider "liberal arts computing program" to be a distinct category with needs that arise from its shared features. The liberal arts computing community expressed a very strong desire for a permanent organization to support its members and represent its interests to the rest of the world. Conversely, we see evidence that the computing education community as a whole values liberal arts computing perspectives and would benefit from a well-defined source for those perspectives. The Committee's main recommendation is therefore to establish a permanent liberal arts computing organization that can serve both to support computing education in the liberal arts and to represent that community in larger conversations.