The Marriage of Mathematics and Programming

In a world where computing skills are a must have, programming is still a hard one to acquire and its courses have high failure rates. Numerous studies propose ways to help the early identification of students that might face difficulties and are more likely to fail a programming course. This study aims to find a correlation between their mathematical abilities and grades in an introductory computer science class following the method of a previous study that had promising results. Students were asked to answer a mathematical abilities test and had their results compared to their grades during the course using the Wilconxon-Mann-Whitney non-parametric test. The results indicate a strong correlation between mathematical abilities and programming potential.