Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization that produces Sesame Street, and IBM announced a collaboration to use IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology and Sesame’s early childhood expertise to help advance preschool education around the world.
Sesame Workshop and IBM are collaborating to combine IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology and Sesame’s early childhood expertise. Together, they hope to advance early childhood education and learning. In this picture, Elmo and Harriet Green, IBM General Manager of Watson Internet of Things, Commerce and Education, enjoy each other’s company. (John O’Boyle, Feature Photo Service for IBM)
As part of a three-year agreement, Sesame Workshop and IBM will collaborate to develop educational platforms and products that will be designed to adapt to the learning preferences and aptitude levels of individual preschoolers. Research shows that a significant extent of brain development occurs in the first five years of a child’s life1, making this window critical for learning and development.
The alliance will draw from Sesame Workshop’s educational content expertise garnered from over 45 years of research, and more than 1,000 studies on how young children learn best. This will combine with Watson’s natural language processing, pattern recognition, and other cognitive computing technologies to create personalized learning experiences intended to complement the roles that parents and teachers play in early development. Watson will continuously hone and improve educational activities by studying and adapting to the aggregate experiences of anonymized groups of students.
“We believe that bringing education together with technology is a key to improving early learning in this country and around the world,” said Jeffrey D. Dunn, CEO of Sesame Workshop. “A generation ago, Sesame Street used the ubiquitous presence of television to reach vulnerable children who did not have access to the learning opportunities that affluent and middle-class kids did. It worked very well. Now, through this collaboration with IBM and Watson, we expect to develop the next generation of tailored learning tools. Ultimately, the goal is to provide children from all socio-economic backgrounds with the opportunity for meaningful, personalized education in their most formative years.”
Echoing the late 1960s, when Sesame Street’s founders convened experts to help conceive the show, the Sesame-IBM team will gather leading teachers, academics, researchers, technologists, gamers, performers, and media executives to brainstorm ways in which cognitive computing can best help preschoolers learn. Sesame Workshop and IBM are currently exploring and iterating on a wide variety of interactive platforms and interfaces for use in homes and schools. The two companies plan to test and share prototypes with leaders in the education and technology community to allow continued refinement based on feedback and domain expertise.
