Remix is how children create today: reusing, recombining, and reinterpreting existing cultural artifacts with digital tools. But the implications of remix for authorship remain largely unexamined — what does ownership mean to a child whose creation started as someone else's drawing, song, or meme?
We conducted six participatory design sessions with 16 children ages 5–11, moving from physical collage remixing to digital tools, to trace how children develop their understanding of authorship and creativity — and how the medium itself shapes those beliefs.
Six 90-minute Cooperative Inquiry design sessions over three months (February–April 2025), each combining snack time, circle time, group design, and discussion.
Early sessions explored remix with physical media (layered collage on paper); later sessions moved to digital remixing and the design of creativity-support tools, letting us compare how each medium shaped children's reasoning.
Final sessions had children design their own remix tools — like a 'Portable Remixer' — surfacing what permission, credit, and control should look like from a child's perspective.
Children treated remixing as a negotiated, interpretive process — not copying. Three threads ran through their practices:
Children remixed with three interpretive priorities — personal expression, respect for the original creator, and communication — making remix a site of ethical reasoning, not just production.
The medium changed the experience of ownership: digital media's easy copying and permanence made creative acts feel more visible and consequential than physical collage, and software norms carried their own assumptions about creativity and control.
Children voiced strong beliefs about permission — 'you should ask the person who created it' — yet their actual practices diverged, revealing a tension between stated values and what tools make easy.
We introduce the Creative Agency Framework: three pathways tracing how remix agency emerges through interpretation and mediation.
Each pathway pairs a form of agency with an authorship concept — assertive agency with the author, dialogic agency with the co-creator, and facilitative agency with the steward — along with the 'myths' about creativity that software makes feel natural.
Most creativity-support tools privilege the expressive, sole-author pathway. We argue for tools that also recognize negotiated and stewardship forms of creativity, so children can see themselves as both creators and cultural producers.