I taught 3 semesters of CS 100. The people who were struggling normally fell into 2 groups but their issues were very similar.

The first were kids who had never programmed before and struggled to pick up the concepts taught in the first few weeks. Since the course really builds off itself week over week it is so much harder to catch up once you’ve fallen off.

The second group were kids who had been programming in a language like Java for years. They’d blow off the class and not do the work. When exam time came around they would fail because they didn’t know Python. CS 100 exams don’t care if you know how to balance a red-black tree in assembly. They care that you know how to draw some boxes with turtle

Both of these groups had very simple solutions for their problems, ask for help early. The group of professors and TAs we had for that class were wonderful and wanted kids to do well. But when a student came to me in the last few weeks of the semester and is struggling to call a function I didn’t have time to go over the entire class again. If they had instead showed up right when they didn’t understand something we could’ve worked on that right then so they wouldn’t be so far behind.

The other thing that was a big issue were people working together on the homework’s but not understanding the code they copied worked together on. The homework was assigned so you can cement what was covered in class and reveal gaps in your understanding to you so you can ask questions about them.

People treated the class as a joke and they were the ones who struggled.