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I've been thinking about this quite a bit, but coming from a different angle. I've been helping at my kid's school with coding clubs for primary students. When

I've been thinking about this quite a bit, but coming from a different angle. I've been helping at my kid's school with coding clubs for primary students. When teachers are recruiting for the coding club they always mention the students who are good at math as good candidates. But what I have noticed is that the students who do the best in coding are more often musically inclined or linguistically talented. It seems to me to make some sense. The ones who can parse and understand languages at an early age might also have the aptitude for programming. It's a small sample size, a few dozen students. Still seems kind of interesting.

Junk_Collector 7y ago
It's also worth thinking about that you don't really learn math in primary school so much as you learn numbers and computation, so when a teacher says a child is good at math they usually mean good at numbers. Very few teachers understand math well enough to identify who would be good at it and a lot of unfortunate students find this out when they get to college.
- geomark 7y ago
  Sure, I can see that. But isn't it similar with language and other subjects? You just learn the basics, nothing deep, no turns of phrases, little expressiveness. Perhaps there is little correlation between those who excel at coding at a young age and those who go on to be good programmers when they get older. I just find it interesting that at this young age I see a correlation between coding skills and language skills more than math (really just arithmetic) skills. Another observation was that we did the Hour of Code activity in December last year with Year 2 to Year 6 students (equivalent to Grade 1 to Grade 5 in the US). And in each group there was one or two student who really stood out. And every one of them was a girl. Small sample size of only about 100 students so maybe I shouldn't be wondering what is going on here.
  - justinmeiners 7y ago
    Math is somewhat unique in that the high-school and early college version is not at all representative of the real thing. Its not "just a taste", its qualitatively different. As the other comment above mentioned, I think this has to do with education of the teachers. Very few teachers know what math is either.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
newen 7y ago
I have a math undergrad, didn't program much until my senior year. Then went to grad school in computer science. Learning data structure and algorithms was very easy for me compared to other students who came from non-math non-CS backgrounds because writing math proofs and designing algorithms are very very similar and use similar though processes and methods. Udi Manber's Introduction to Algorithms show how you use mathematical thought processes to design algorithms.
justinmeiners 7y ago
You may be surprised that this also applies to math. High-level math values logical and linguistic skills. This is often a hard stopping point for many students who were good at high school computation like calculus.
analog31 7y ago
A friend of mine taught high school math until recently. He told me a similar thing about math. The kids who are "good at math" in elementary school don't necessarily become the top math students later on. He felt that his best math students were the ones who were just curious about a lot of things as kids.

Junk_Collector 7y ago

It's also worth thinking about that you don't really learn math in primary school so much as you learn numbers and computation, so when a teacher says a child is good at math they usually mean good at numbers. Very few teachers understand math well enough to identify who would be good at it and a lot of unfortunate students find this out when they get to college.

geomark 7y ago
Sure, I can see that. But isn't it similar with language and other subjects? You just learn the basics, nothing deep, no turns of phrases, little expressiveness. Perhaps there is little correlation between those who excel at coding at a young age and those who go on to be good programmers when they get older. I just find it interesting that at this young age I see a correlation between coding skills and language skills more than math (really just arithmetic) skills. Another observation was that we did the Hour of Code activity in December last year with Year 2 to Year 6 students (equivalent to Grade 1 to Grade 5 in the US). And in each group there was one or two student who really stood out. And every one of them was a girl. Small sample size of only about 100 students so maybe I shouldn't be wondering what is going on here.
- justinmeiners 7y ago
  Math is somewhat unique in that the high-school and early college version is not at all representative of the real thing. Its not "just a taste", its qualitatively different. As the other comment above mentioned, I think this has to do with education of the teachers. Very few teachers know what math is either.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

newen 7y ago

I have a math undergrad, didn't program much until my senior year. Then went to grad school in computer science. Learning data structure and algorithms was very easy for me compared to other students who came from non-math non-CS backgrounds because writing math proofs and designing algorithms are very very similar and use similar though processes and methods. Udi Manber's Introduction to Algorithms show how you use mathematical thought processes to design algorithms.

justinmeiners 7y ago

You may be surprised that this also applies to math. High-level math values logical and linguistic skills. This is often a hard stopping point for many students who were good at high school computation like calculus.

analog31 7y ago

A friend of mine taught high school math until recently. He told me a similar thing about math. The kids who are "good at math" in elementary school don't necessarily become the top math students later on. He felt that his best math students were the ones who were just curious about a lot of things as kids.