  Community-based afterschool programs are valuable spaces for researchers to
codesign technologies with direct relevance to local communities. However,
afterschool programs differ in resources available, culture, and student
demographics in ways that may impact the efficacy of the codesign process and
outcome. We ran a series of multi-week educational game codesign workshops
across five programs over twenty weeks and found notable differences, despite
deploying the same protocol. Our findings characterize three types of programs:
Safe Havens, Recreation Centers, and Homework Helpers. We note major
differences in students' patterns of participation directly influenced by each
program's culture and expectations for equitable partnerships and introduce
Comparative Design-Based Research (cDBR) as a beneficial lens for codesign.
