Your language brain matters more for learning programming than your math brain

[Judi Lynn]

New research contradicts long held assumptions about coding

Amy Nippert
Neuroscience
University of Minnesota

May 12, 2020

When you think of learning another language, you probably think of French, Spanish, or Chinese. But what about Python or Java? The two processes might be more similar than you’d think.

A recent study published from researchers at the University of Washington showed that language ability and problem solving skills best predict how quickly people learn Python, a popular programming language. Their research, published in Scientific Reports, used behavioral tests and measures of brain activity to see how they correlated with how fast and well participants learned programming.

For the study, 42 participants were recruited to try a popular online coding course through Codeacademy. They were asked to complete ten 45-minute lessons of the “Learn Python” course. From the 36 participants who completed the study, they were able to determine rate of learning and how well the students learned the lessons.

Before doing online classes, participants did a battery of tests designed to look at math skills, working memory, problem solving, and second language learning ability. During their online programming course, the researchers were able to track how quickly they learned and how well they did in the quizzes built into the online software. They also completed a quiz and coding task at the end of the study to look at their overall coding knowledge.

More:
https://massivesci.com/articles/programming-math-language-python-women-in-science/

[mr_lebowski]

1. You could be a great coder without knowing that 1+1 equals 2, easily ...

The majority of coding work done in the world has absolutely no math involved.

Obviously if you're coding 'math stuff' in your app, then you have to know it.

[Igel]

2. And yet problem solving matters,

and one good way of working on that is math.

It's like saying you can know grammar without knowing vocabulary. It's true, but fluent grammar with a 1k-word vocab isn't going to get you far.

Database-search algorithms, for example, and program validation are basically math. Not arithmetic, math.

[mr_lebowski]

3. All true, but there are still definitely many programming tasks you could do w/o math skills

Like algebra, geometry/trig, calculus, etc.

It would be easy to specialize in types of coding that require little or even no understanding of it.

It does make sense to me that for the task at hand in the study (learning a new programming language) that language skills would be more important than math skills. Learning new languages is basically mapping new words/term with concepts. Very similar process to learning a foreign language.

You wouldn't end up being a great coder if you actually lack the capacity to understand concepts that are shared in common with math, though. Like problem solving, as you mention.