Within the HCI community, there has been increasing attention to address issues of injustice through participatory and community-engaged approaches. In addition, researchers who conduct this collaborative work with marginalized groups are sharing the institutional vulnerabilities, challenges, and harms that can impact their well-being and their work. In this paper, we argue how the HCI community can learn from the knowledge and strategies of activists who engage in collective action and movement work. In particular, we discuss the role of joy in participatory, community-engaged, and equity-oriented work. Through testimonial authority, we present stories to describe the importance of cultivating joy, how we design for joy, what joy looks like in our work, and how joy can be a sustaining force for researchers and collaborators alike. We end with implications for HCI design and research work with marginalized communities.

Educators are often described as practitioners and can be subject to deficit-oriented characterizations that position their work as focused on the passive dissemination of knowledge. This pictorial argues that educators are designers, and their curation of learning environments and experiences constitutes an underappreciated and complex design practice. Further, the design work that educators engage in is significant and consequential as it can define or reimagine who participates and what is valued in educational spaces – playing an important role in creating more equitable educational outcomes. In this pictorial, we leverage photos captured and curated by educators of their learning environments in library makerspaces and youth-serving technology centers to make their unseen design work and impact visible. Beyond making educators’ expertise more visible, this pictorial also offers design considerations for designers of technologies, materials, and experiences that may be situated in educational environments.

This pictorial presents visuals of families engaging with creative technologies as “knowledge-building artifacts” to provoke reflection on the social, material, and emotional context of designed interactions (“things that make you think”) as well as provocations to re-value these contexts and promote alternative visions in what and how engagement with computing can look like (“things that matter”). The selected images are from a large and ongoing collection of documentation from a family technology program. The images were captured using the Reggio Emilia documentation approach to documentation, which aims to “make learning visible.”

Physical play has often been leveraged to provide children with active and engaging learning experiences. However, coding activities are predominantly sedentary in front of the screen, and the application of physical play in Computer Science education is less explored, e.g., how can we engage in computational thinking (CT) through physical play? In this design-based exploration, we conducted three design activities where young children, college students, and researchers were invited to create physical play projects using the BBC micro:bit and reflect on their experiences. By examining participants’ projects and creating processes, we provide empirical evidence that remixing physical play activities with coding can engage learners in various CT concepts and practices, reveal how CT concepts and practices can be represented in physical play, and highlight implications for designing physical play-mediated computational learning experiences. Ultimately, we encourage more learning experiences to incorporate physical play into computing education for children.

We leverage the visual format and affordances of pictorials to make visible and call attention to the unseen design work of educators and designers of creative learning experiences in making and tinkering spaces. We document the process of design and iteration that took place as researchers and educators co-designed a learning experience focused on the intersection of artmaking, circuitry, and computing for participants in a public library makerspace. We present this visual case study as provocations for interaction designers, educators, and researchers who aim to engage people in creative learning experiences with technologies.

HCI researchers have been investigating family dynamics with new and emerging technologies during joint media engagement (JME) experiences. However, most studies describe family dynamics from parents’ perspectives, such as their roles and mediation practices, while the roles and agency of other family members are less understood. In this paper, we examine family dynamics through the lens of negotiation between family members. Our study is located within an informal learning program called Family Creative Learning, where families from non-dominant groups were invited to participate in a series of workshops to create with a programming app called ScratchJr. Through analysis of data that included process, artifact, and reflective data, we identify negotiation practices of family members as they advocate for device and creative control. We further discuss how the lens of negotiation expands the meaning of productive JME in family contexts and highlight design considerations to facilitate engaging joint family experiences with educational technologies.

In this pictorial, we present an approach to using documentation as a means to enable learners and facilitators to recognize and reflect on learning. We build on an approach developed by the Reggio Emilia network of schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. We share our iterative design and describe our approach where facilitators documented families’ experiences making and tinkering with construction kits such as Scratch and Makey Makey. Facilitators then reflected on, curated, and shared documentation with families. We illustrate this approach with documentation from three families. We conclude with reflections on what these visuals of learning afford for interaction design.

To inform the design of personally meaningful computational learning experiences for young people, it is necessary to investigate children’s perceptions of coding, such that new learning experience designs can better leverage their funds of knowledge. We conducted focus groups with 20 young children in two coding workshops to learn their perceptions of coding. The young participants mainly form their perceptions of coding based on past coding- and computer-related experiences and typically associate coding with controlling the computer, creating projects, expressing ideas, playing video games, and the language for communicating with the computer. Importantly, young children might not know the right strategies to debug code but try practices like restarting the device and deleting the whole code. Based on the findings, we highlight the pedagogical implications to design productive computational learning experiences for young people.

In this paper, we investigate the opportunities and limitations that emerge when we engage youth and their families in creating and sharing stories with a computational construction kit, specifically the ScratchJr programming environment. We examine the participation of children and their families in the Family Creative Learning program, a culturally responsive computing context that engages families to create and share stories with computing. Our findings highlight the ways that families discovered new possibilities for their storytelling using the computational construction kit, but they also experienced challenges in representing their stories and themselves. We discuss the opportunities in storytelling with construction kits and possible limitations when designing to support expression, especially among groups historically marginalized from computing spaces.

Parental mediation literature is mostly situated in the contexts of television, Internet use, video games, and mobile devices, while there is less understanding of how parents mediate their children’s engagement with educational-focused media. We examine parental involvement in young children’s use of a creation-oriented educational media, i.e., coding kits, from a mediation perspective through an interview study. We frame parents’ mediation practices along three dimensions: (1) creative mediation, where parents mediate to support children’s creating and learning with media; (2) preparative mediation, where parents explore and prepare media for children’s engagement; and (3) administrative mediation, where parents administer and regulate their children’s media use. Compared to the restrictive, active, and co-using mediation theory, our proposed framework highlights various supportive practices parents take to help their children learn and create with media. We further connect our findings to Joint Media Engagement and reflect on implications for parent involvement in children’s creation-oriented media design.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shifted family life across home, work, and education, especially families from nondominant groups. As schools and other educational programs moved online, parents became the primary facilitators for their children's learning. In this work, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 parents from nondominant groups. Insights from interviews highlight the technology-based learning experiences of young children during the pandemic, how parents facilitated these learning experiences, and the challenges parents and children encountered in these learning experiences. We summarize four parental facilitation patterns for children's learning (i.e., designing learning, finding resources, managing, and teaching) and highlight equity issues in distance learning, such as unequal access to learning resources and quality education. Finally, we further reflect on potential solutions to address the challenges parents have reported and share implications for designing technologies that better address children's and parents' needs during a crisis.

As education researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders recognize the importance of computing, many coding kits (toys and apps) have emerged to help young children learn to code at home. However, how parents perceive and support their children's use of the kits at home are less understood. In this study, we performed semi-structured interviews with eighteen parents who obtained coding kits for their young children for home use. The results show parents expected their kids to have fun and meaningful interactions with the kits. In supporting the play, parents took on various roles, mostly acting as spectator, scaffolder, and teacher. While parents perceived benefits of coding kits like a changed perspective on coding, they also reported concerns, such as their limited programming knowledge to provide help. Finally, we reflect on design and research implications to develop coding kits that consider parents' perspectives and important roles in supporting young children's exploration with computational thinking.

Many toys and kits have been developed to help cultivate computational thinking in young children in the past decade. However, a majority of these kits ask children to move a robot/character around a limited space, constraining what could otherwise be generative and creative learning experiences into pre-defined activities and challenges with uniform outcomes. How can we expand what children can program and how they can create code? In this work, we present CodeAttach, a learning kit designed to engage young children in computational thinking through physical play activities. CodeAttach consists of three parts: (1) an interactive hardware device, (2) a mobile application to program the device, and (3) supporting materials for different play activities. With CodeAttach, children can attach the device to the supporting materials or other everyday objects to create their own props for physical play. The device offers different inputs and outputs and supports children to change the rules of existing physical activities or create new activities by programming this device. We outline the principles guiding the design of CodeAttach, its initial development process, and insights from early playtest with young kids and expert researchers.

Creative learning kits are physical, low-cost and easy to fabricate materials that support creative learning experiences. The kits were designed to be used in the context of physical microworlds: environments that support learning through the making of personally meaningful projects. Since the microworlds were first proposed by Seymour Papert in the 1980s, implementations of microworlds tend to use primarily technology-based kits that require high-end materials like computers. In low-resourced settings, what might the possibilities be to implement this approach using primarily low-cost and familiar materials? To explore these questions, we present the design of four physical, low-cost kits: Creature Creature Creation Kit, Interior Design Kit, Wearable Kit, and Automata Kit.

The Telling Board uses the concept of storyboarding (organizing graphics in sequence) to enable children ages 6 and up to conceptualize and build their own narratives. By populating square grids on the board with their choice of either pre-illustrated or their own hand drawn "story cards," children practice crafting stories in sequence from beginning to end. They are able to tell those stories and share them via a built-in recording mechanism on the board.

This paper presents a survey of computational kits that enable young children (ages 7 years old and under) to explore computing ideas and practices. We examined physical, virtual, and hybrid kits across three different perspectives: how they are designed, how they support children to explore computational concepts and practices, and how they enable children to engage in a range of projects and activities. Based on our analysis, we present design suggestions and opportunities to expand the possibilities in how children can engage in computing, what kinds of projects children can make, and what kinds of computational ideas children can explore.

In this paper, we investigate the support of online creative collaborations among young programmers in Scratch. We designed and implemented two online collaboration events, the Collab Challenge and Collab Camp, implemented in January 2011 and in August 2011, respectively, in which members of the Scratch community were invited to work together on programming projects. This paper explores what we learned from iteratively designing and implementing the second event Collab Camp. In our analyses, we reflect on how the changes in context of collaboration (context), the opportunities for finding collaborators (connection), and the engagement of members in constructive feedback (critique) emerged as critical spaces supportive of online collaboration. We discuss how these spaces can serve as guiding principles for online communities that support young designers in creating expressive and personally meaningful projects together.

Online creative production has received considerable attention for its success in creating Wikipedia and Free and Open Source Software yet few youth participate in such voluntary online collaborations, in particular in programming contexts. In this paper, we describe how youth programmers organized collaborative groups or collabs in response to a design challenge in the Scratch Online Community. We report on participation in the “Collab Challenge” in the Scratch community at large and with particular groups, designers’ efforts in recruiting and organizing collab groups, and the role of community feedback. In the discussion, we address what we learned about youth’s informal collaborative skills, fostering community participation, and the design of online communities supportive of creative collaboration, and open issues for further research.