Empowering families facing English literacy challenges to jointly engage in computer programming

Research suggests that parental engagement through Joint Media Engagement (JME) is an important factor in chil-dren's learning for coding and programming. Unfortunate-ly, parents with limited technology background may have difficulty supporting their children's access to program-ming. English-language learning (ELL) families from mar-ginalized communities face particular challenges in under-standing and supporting programming, as code is primarily authored using English text. We present BlockStudio, a programming tool for empowering ELL families to jointly engage in introductory coding, using an environment em-bodying two design principles, text-free and visually con-crete. We share a case study involving three community centers serving immigrant and refugee populations. Our findings show ELL families can jointly engage in pro-gramming without text, via co-creation and flexible roles, and can create a range of artifacts, indicating understanding of aspects of programming within this environment. We conclude with implications for coding together in ELL fam-ilies and design ideas for text-free programming research.