Opportunities and Limitations of Construction Kits in Culturally Responsive Computing Contexts: Lessons from ScratchJr and Family Creative Learning
Ricarose Roque, Mariana Aki Tamashiro, Kathryn Mcconnell, Julisa Granados
Abstract
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.