Admitting you have a problem is the first step: Modeling when and why students seek help in programming assignments.

In computer science education timely help seeking during large programming projects is essential for student success. Help-seeking in typical courses happens in office hours and through online forums. In this research, we analyze students coding activities and help requests to understand the interaction between these activities. We collected student's help requests during coding assignments on two different platforms in a CS2 course, and categorized those requests into eight categories (including implementation, addressing test failures, general debugging, etc.). Then we analyzed the proportion of each type of requests and how they changed over time. We also collected student's coding status(including what part of the code changed and the frequency of committing) before they seek help to investigate if students share a similar code change behavior leading to certain type of help requests.