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Background and Context. Existing works in computing students' help-seeking and resource selection identified an expanding set of important dimensions that students consider when choosing a help resource. However, most works either assume a predefined list of help resources or focus on one specific help resource, while the landscape of help resources evolve at a faster speed. Objectives. We seek to study how students value each dimension in the help landscape in their resource selection and utilization processes, as well as how their identities relate to their perceptions of the landscape. Method. We surveyed N=1,625 students on their perceptions of 8 dimensions across 12 offerings of 7 courses at 2 institutions. Findings. We found a consistent pattern of four distinct dimension tiers ordered from most to least important: (1) timeliness of help, (2) availability and adaptability of the resource, (3) the resource's time/space anchor and the effort to phrase the help need, (4) formality and socialness of the resource. We also found men and first-years rate all dimensions as less important than their classmates. Implications. Our results reveal what the students collectively value most when selecting help resources and thus can inform practitioners seeking to improve their course help ecosystem. 

The accessibility and effectiveness of help-seeking resources plays a pivotal role in contributing to the success of students in Computer Science courses. However, students do not always choose to utilize these resources, and when they do, their experiences can vary. While some students commend help-seeking resources for effectively providing clarification on assignment instructions, debugging code, and addressing questions about course concepts, others share instances where their problems were not resolved, or, in some cases, they did not receive any meaningful guidance from these resources. In this study, we examine the experiences of students enrolled in a CS2 course, all of whom had access to the course's help-seeking resources. These experiences were gathered through qualitative interviews at three time points within a semester. Our findings, derived from emergent coding, reveal thematic patterns in student encounters with help-seeking resources and contribute to a broader theme regarding help-seeking resource utilization at different phases of the semester. The findings of this investigation contribute to the wider conversation on student success and help-seeking resource utilization in Computer Science education. 

Students can have widely varying experiences while working on CS2 coding projects. Challenging experiences can lead to lower motivation and less success in completing these assignments. In this paper, we identify the common struggles CS2 students face while working on course projects and examine whether or not there is evidence of improvement in these areas of struggle between projects. While previous work has been conducted on understanding the importance of self-regulated learning to student success, it has not been fully investigated in the scope of CS2 coursework. We share our observations on investigating student struggles while working on coding projects through their self-reported response to a project reflection form. We apply emergent coding to identify student struggles at three points during the course and compare them against student actions in the course, such as project start times and office hours participation, to identify if students were overcoming these struggles. Through our coding and analysis we have found that while a majority of students encounter struggles with time management and debugging of failing tests, students tend to emphasize wanting to improve their time management skills in future coding assignments.