Identifying Challenging CS1 Concepts in a Large Problem Dataset

We examine student difficulties with CS1 concepts by analyzing a dataset containing 266,852 student responses to weekly code-writing problems. We find that conditionals and loops prove particularly problematic, even when considering "second chance" data; and that, while we observe some evidence of improvement, certain straightforward applications of loops continue to be problematic at the end of the term. Our contribution is the corroboration of earlier findings, and a call to use online repositories of student submissions as rich sources of data on the student learning experience.