Making Space: Dis/ability and the Scratch Online Community
Name
3704637.3734776.pdf
Size
853.59 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
dc47fdeecca2a69dbd23b6b22b01f690
Author(s)
Sadler, Cecil?
Trapp, Jaleesa
Date Issued
July 14, 2025
Publisher
ACM|Proceedings of the 2025 Conference for Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology
Citation
Cecilé Sadler and Jaleesa Trapp. 2025. Making Space: Dis/ability and the Scratch Online Community. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT 2025). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 153–159.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Dis/abled youth often face barriers to participation in computational making spaces. This paper examines how youth engage with the Scratch online community to share projects and discussions around dis/ability, creating meaningful connections through creative self-expression. Through counter-storytelling examples, we demonstrate how young people leverage Scratch not only as a programming platform but as a space to build community and celebrate dis/ability identity. Our findings uplift the ways in which young people engage in these spaces to highlight how creative computing environments foster inclusion and connection, dispelling deficit-based narratives in computer science education.
Description
RESPECT 2025, July 14–16, 2025, Newark, NJ, USA
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3704637.3734776
