TY - GEN
T1 - Empowering families facing English literacy challenges to jointly engage in computer programming
AU - Banerjee, Rahul
AU - Liu, Leanne
AU - Sobel, Kiley
AU - Pitt, Caroline
AU - Lee, Kung Jin
AU - Wang, Meng
AU - Chen, Sijin
AU - Davison, Lydia
AU - Yip, Jason C.
AU - Ko, Andrew J.
AU - Popović, Zoran
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors wish to thank all immigrant community part-ners, families and children that helped us with this study. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1314399.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
PY - 2018/4/20
Y1 - 2018/4/20
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Coding
KW - English-language learning (ELL) families
KW - Joint media engagement (JME)
KW - Programming
KW - Text-free
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85046962808&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3173574.3174196
DO - 10.1145/3173574.3174196
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85046962808
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2018 - Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2018
Y2 - 21 April 2018 through 26 April 2018
ER -
