Abstract: Results in introductory programming courses are often disappointing. Several possible causes for this situation have been reported. One of them is the differences between students in terms of their individual characteristics. This paper reports some results of an experiment where we tried to find correlations between first year student’s performance in an initial programming course and some of their characteristics, namely previous programming experience, secondary education grades (in general and in Mathematics), learning styles, problem solving abilities and motivation to the study area. The study took place during the academic year of 2007-2008 and involved two different groups of students, from two different institutions, that followed two different programming languages approaches