#91: Coding as Cultural Expression: Understanding How Children Draw on and Transform Cultural Resources

Creative coding can support children in expressing identity and drawing on everyday cultural experience, but less is known about how this happens in practice or how tools shape it. This poster reports early findings from a culture-themed workshop with Chinese children using OctoStudio. Using screen and audio recordings, project artifacts, and field notes, we found that children incorporated cultural resources through storytelling, imagery, and speech, such as festivals, family roles, dialects, and mythic imagination. These findings frame coding as a culturally situated practice and inform the design of culturally responsive creative learning technologies.