Honoring practices of community-based educators: lessons learned from the collaborative design of a creative mobile app

This paper shares reflections and stories from a collaborative design process between the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab and a global network of community-based educators to develop a creative coding app called OctoStudio, which supports children and families to create and share interactive projects on mobile devices. The app design is grounded in practices that community-based educators who are primarily from the Global South have developed around strengths, needs, and interests of children and their communities, as well as constraints and affordances of local infrastructure. We use the lens of minimal computing – which focuses on community context and constraints in decisions about technology – to describe our collaborative work on OctoStudio. We describe trade-offs involved in the design decisions, and highlight insights from the process of collaboration to develop tools and practices that are more responsive and meaningful to communities who are often excluded from design decisions that impact them.