A one year empirical study of student programming bugs

Students in introductory Computer Science courses often have difficulty with coding and problem solving which results in bugs. These bugs cause both student frustration and attrition of many of our CS majors. In this work, we seek to understand the problems that students believe they cannot solve on their own and for which they ask tutors for assistance. We collect and analyze 450 bugs that were brought to our tutor lab by our CS1 and CS2 students over a one year period. The results show that approximately 22% of the problems are due to problem solving skills, while the remaining problems involve a combination of logic and syntax problems for specific topics in the courses.