The SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts College is charged with providing a network for faculty interested in liberal arts computing programs and providing a voice for the community in larger discussions of computing education. This BoF will invite the SIGCSE community to learn more about the liberal arts and gather information about community priorities for networking and/or advocacy. After a brief introduction to the Committee and its goals, participants will form breakout groups to discuss the priorities and needs of liberal arts CS education. Facilitators will report back high priority items to the room. Then groups will be formed around the common themes, and participants will discuss concrete work for the Committee. The Committee will use the feedback from this session to plan events and activities for the coming year, including the creation of Working Groups, which BoF participants can join. Any SIGCSE attendee with an interest in the liberal arts is welcome to attend. We interpret the liberal arts broadly as programs emphasizing education for the breadth of graduates' career, civic, and personal lives. Faculty at all institution types may also be interested in attending if they supervise graduate students or lead REU programs. Because the stated objective of this event is to hear from new voices, including students, and build connections, our activities will be structured to encourage participation among all attendees. More information about the Committee is available at https://computing-in-the-liberal-arts.github.io/.

The recently released CS2023 Curriculum Guidelines propose a "CS Core" of topics that any student with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science must know. While the process of generating CS2023 included multiple rounds of feedback from the CS community, the end result is necessarily the result of compromise and may not meet the needs of all institutions. In particular, the size of the CS Core, as measured in instructional time or courses, may not be consistent with all programs. Small programs with limited faculty, liberal arts programs wishing to ensure space for academic exploration, or departments wanting to explore less traditional curricular structures may find a large CS Core limiting. The 2024 report "Piecing Together the Next 15 Years of Computing Education" edited by Decker and Weiss discusses the challenges of our increasingly "overstuffed curricula" and the barriers this can erect against broadening participation in computing.

Previous research argues that liberal arts computer science programs are defining new directions for curricula based on distinctive features of their institutional and/or departmental identity. These innovations, and the approach to curricular design that inform them, can inspire curricular innovation at large universities, community colleges, and K-12 institutions. This panel illustrates an approach to curriculum design based on institutional and/or departmental identity with specific examples from four programs. It will guide audience members to consider distinctive features of their program context and how that can influence their curricula.

ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines for computer science, such as CS2013 or the forthcoming CS2023, provide well-researched and detailed guidance about the content and skills that make up an undergraduate computer science (CS) program. Liberal arts CS programs often struggle to apply these guidelines within their institutional context and goals. Historically, this has been addressed through the development of model CS curricula tailored for the liberal arts context. We take a different position: that no single model curriculum can apply across the wide range of liberal arts institutions. Instead, we argue that liberal arts CS educators need best practices for using guidelines such as CS2023 to inform curriculum design. These practices must acknowledge the opportunities and priorities of a liberal arts philosophy as well as a program's mission and identity. This paper reviews the context and motivation behind computing in the liberal arts. We also review the history of liberal arts CS educators and ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines. We present data and trends about liberal arts computing programs, discussing how this informs curriculum design. Finally, we propose a process that guides programs to work with curriculum guidelines through the lens of institutional and program missions and identities, goals, and situational factors.

A liberal arts context offers unique opportunities for curricular innovation that can inform the implementation of computing curricula more broadly. The SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts Colleges has collected 18 model curricula during affiliated events at SIGCSE symposia over the past two years. Here we conduct a distillation of the curricula and discuss themes across the curricula including: flexible pathways through majors, interdisciplinary initiatives, and preparing students for a range of careers and their first job. Our discussion focuses on how liberal arts colleges are empowered to think creatively about computing curricula and how research intensive universities, community colleges, and K-12 can leverage these approaches for their context.

This lightning talk will describe how we have introduced self-efficacy surveys into an object-oriented programming course with the goal of encouraging reflection and positive learning behaviors on the part of our students. Self-efficacy surveys such as the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) are frequently used to quantify the effect of pedagogical innovations on student learning. This is motivated by an understanding that a positive attitude of self-efficacy can lead to improved student retention and outcomes. Some authors have also written about the benefits of measuring self-efficacy to help instructors better support individual students. We conjectured that asking students to reflect on their own sense of self-efficacy could help students make positive choices about their learning behaviors. For the past two semesters we have deployed a self-efficacy survey at the start of the course and at midterm - two natural points for students to consider how they are approaching their coursework. Students assess elements of their own self-efficacy as well as answer open-ended questions about actions they can take to support their learning and barriers they are concerned may get in the way of their learning. We will present our survey, describe how it is used in the course, and discuss some initial positive effects we have observed.

The SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts Colleges was approved in late 2015 and began organizing itself at SIGCSE 2016. The Committee has made an initial survey of the liberal arts computer science landscape, and has identified some central issues for more detailed study. This session will present the Committee's initial findings and future plans, and will solicit audience participation in refining the set of central issues and identifying possible resolutions to them.

How can CS faculty at liberal arts colleges better communicate with colleagues and the public about the value our institutions offer? Liberal arts colleges play an important role in undergraduate CS education. Liberal arts skills are widely valued in the tech industry, many liberal arts undergraduates go on to earn Ph.D.s in STEM, and many of the educational innovations presented at SIGCSE are developed by liberal arts faculty. Yet, our colleagues at research universities often misunderstand what we do at liberal arts colleges. And while we see the liberal arts and computer science as supporting each other, the popular media tends to portray them as diametrically opposed. These misconceptions limit our opportunities to attract new students and colleagues, as well as opportunities to contribute to public discourse about the important role of information technology in our society. In this BoF, we aim to collaboratively develop communication strategies for individual participants and for the liberal arts CS community as a whole.

Effective computer science curricula can develop students' abilities more broadly than just ensuring content mastery and algorithmic thinking. Computer science curricula may also include components focused on technical writing and communication skills, ethical practice of computing, effective teamwork and project management, and the application of computer science in a broader interdisciplinary context. In this session, attendees will be invited to share information about how they are incorporating this content into their curricula and the challenges they are facing in doing so. By sharing information about our current practices, attendees will help develop a survey of the variety of strategies CS programs are using to deliver this educational content. Attendees will also be given the opportunity to discuss the specific teaching challenges they encounter in their courses when teaching this content and share effective solutions they may have found to these problems.

This paper describes the introduction of a feedback-revision-resubmission cycle for homework assignments in two introductory courses. The goal was to increase student engagement with homework assignments as an important tool for concept practice and mastery. A review of the effects in both an object-oriented programming course and a relational databases course shows positive outcomes as reflected in both course evaluations and a decision tree analysis of student performance on assignments.

No abstract available.

Addresses the issue of research communities in science and engineering and their effects on graduate students, and women in particular. We present our observations of graduate student experiences in one particular research community. These observations are considered in the context of research done by national science institutes and feminist theorists about the under-representation of women in scientific research communities. We offer suggestions as to how community-building activities can enhance science and the scientific experience for all involved.