Testing the perception of time, state and causality to predict programming aptitude

The aim of the research presented in this paper is the development of a novel approach to predict programming aptitude. The existing programming aptitude tests rely on the past academic performance of students, on their psychological features or on a combination of both. The novelty of the proposed approach is that it attempts to measure student capabilities to manipulate abstract concepts that are related with programming, namely time, state and causality. These concepts were captured in OhBalls - a physical simulation of the path taken by a sequence of balls through an apparatus of conveyor belts and levers. An engine for this kind of simulation was implemented and deployed as a web application, creating a self-contained test that was applied to a cohort of first-year undergraduate students to validate the proposed approach. This paper describes the proposed type of programming aptitude test, a software engine implementing it, a validation experiment, discusses the results obtained so far and points out future research.