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Learning to program is notoriously difficult. A substantial minority of students fails in every introductory programming course in every UK university. Despite great academic effort, the proportion has increased rather than decreased over the years, and despite a great deal of research into teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause.
It has long been suspected that some people have a natural aptitude for programming, but until now there has been no psychological test which could detect it. It is not correlated with age, with gender, or with educational attainment; nor is it correlated with any of the aptitudes measured in conventional 'intelligence' or 'problem-solving-ability' tests.
We have found a test for programming aptitude, of which we give details. Remarkably, we can predict success or failure even before students have had any contact with any programming language, and with total accuracy. We present statistical analyses to prove the latter point. We speculate that programming teaching is therefore ineffective for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are bound to succeed.
A draft paper with the details of this talk may be found here; please note that this paper may change before submission for publication. An example test sheet will appear here shortly.