Case Studies of Liberal Arts Computer Science Programs D. BALDWIN SUNY Geneseo A. BRADY Kalamazoo College A. DANYLUK Williams College J. ADAMS Calvin College and A. LAWRENCE Spelman College Many undergraduate liberal arts institutions offer computer science majors. This article illus- trates how quality computer science programs can be realized in a wide variety of liberal arts settings by describing and contrasting the actual programs at five liberal arts colleges: Williams College, Kalamazoo College, the State University of New York at Geneseo, Spelman College, and Calvin College. While the example programs differ in size, mission, and the nature of their home institutions, all take advantage of their liberal arts setting to offer rich computer science edu- cations. Comparing these programs to each other and to the latest ACM/IEEE Computer Soci- ety computer science curriculum shows that the liberal arts programs are distinguishable from the ACM/Computer Society recommendations, but at the same time are strong undergraduate majors. Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Infor- mation Science Education—Computer science education; curriculum General Terms: Design Authors’ addresses: D. Baldwin, Department of Computer Science, SUNY Geneseo, 1 College Circle, Geneseo, NY, 14454; A. Brady, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Kalamazoo College, 1200 Academy Street, Kalamazoo, MI 49006; A, Danyluk, Department of Computer Science, Williams College, 47 Lab Campus Drive, Williamstown, MA 01267; email: andrea@cs.williams.edu; J. Adams, Department of Computer Science, Calvin College, 3201 Burton SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546; A. Lawrence, Spelman College, 350 Spelman Lane S.W., Atlanta, GA 30314. Permission to make digital or hard copies part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commer- cial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permission may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701, USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c  2010 ACM 1946-6626/2010/03-ART4 $10.00 DOI: 10.1145/1731041.1731045. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1731041.1731045. ACM Transactions on Computing Education, Vol. 10, No. 1, Article 4, Pub. date: March 2010.