Failure rates in Maths and CS 1: are they associated?

Programming is a fundamental part of informatics engineering curriculum, but it is often problematic. Mathematical knowledge is very important for programming and there are studies evidencing some relationship between programming skills and experience in mathematics. In this exploratory study, developed in Coimbra Institute of Engineering, we observed an high rate of abstention from evaluations and, from students that performed evaluation, most of them have similar results on both curricular units. This relationship forces us to pay particular attention to the Differential and Integral Calculus curricular unit integrated in the curriculum of informatics engineering degrees, which also shows high failure rates. This justifies an intervention in terms of complementary actions, to allow the development of competencies in terms of logical reasoning and problem solving, competencies evidenced as necessary to learn programming.