The Effects of Mathematics on Programming Skills and its Retention: An Experimental Study

The focus on Computer Science Education at the K-12 level has been increasingly highlighted due to today’s need for a populace with computational thinking skills, in addition to the expansion of careers related to computing and computer science. Programming helps facilitate students’ examination of the nature of a problem and helps students to increase their computational thinking, problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills through the combination of multiple disciplines in areas such as science, the arts, engineering, and mathematics. How to facilitate the teaching of programming to younger learners has become an essential question, as programming by itself focuses more on structure, debugging, and syntaxes. Becoming involved with a second discipline provides students with additional opportunity to form creative solutions to a given problem as it provides a different perspective and helps link academic problem solving with the real world. The current study is an example of how to involve mathematics as the second discipline in the teaching of programming, and to see the differences between the acquisition of programming skills and its retention. Quasi-Experimental Research was conducted on a large sample (N = 188), with four groups randomly assigned as experimental and control groups. The results of the study show that the increment on students’ programming skills and retention of those who learned programming through the integration of mathematics as the second discipline were higher than students who learned programming through traditional methods. These results were also found to be statistically significant (p < .05)