The GIANT Room continues their partnership with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop

After a successful first round of partnership, The GIANT Room continues their engagement with Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to bring kids’ voices into the design process of STEM products

The GIANT Room, an innovation hub for children and their families, is pleased to announce they are continuing their partnership with Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to bring together diverse groups of youth with researchers and industry innovators to put learning, wellbeing, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) at the center of product development for children. For this second round, families with children ages 3 to 6 years old are invited to apply.

Participation entails joining one free workshops to engage with Duolingo designers and collaborate with them in designing a new suite of products. Kids who join will have a chance to learn and practice the art of giving and receiving feedback and then to join a prototyping exercise with industry innovators and researchers. These workshops will be held in person at The GIANT Room in New York City, free of charge for families. 

Central to The GIANT Room’s mission, is the notion that all children should have access to quality creative STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) tools and learning experiences to build the world they like to live in. “We believe the best creative STEM tools are the ones that are designed with children’s point of view in mind, and even better, those that are designed with children involved in the design process,” said Dr. Azi Jamalian, founder of The GIANT Room. “Kids have wonderful ideas to share. If given the opportunity, they design the most magical tools, toys, and products that can enlighten millions of other kids..” 

The first cohort of children in this program provided invaluable feedback to designers of a new math platform, came up with ideas of their own math games, built prototypes other vision, and shared their prototypes with the designers. A full report covering the first cohort of this program will be soon published on The GIANT Room’s website as well as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s blog. We are truly excited to expand this partnership and welcome our second cohort of children to the program. “One by one, we’ll bring kids voice and ideas into the design process of products to be used by millions of kids around the world,” said, Dr. Azi Jamalian. “First is to give them a seat at the table. Next, we try genuinely incorporate their ideas into the products.”

“Giving and receiving feedback is a crucial step in any design and innovation process,” said Dr. Jessica Mezei, co-founder of The GIANT Room. “Surprisingly though we rarely learn how to constructively give feedback or apply feedback in our creative process. Many of us first encounter critiques or “proposal defense” in college or grad school, which may be too late. It’s better for children to grow up developing a growth mindset and believing that feedback is a necessary part of their growth.” 

This program is completely free for children to participate. Learnings from this initiative will inform designing a framework of best practices to include youth as co-designers in developing real products. We are accepting a limited number of children in New York City to participate in the second phase of the program. Families with children ages 3 to 6 years old are invited to apply.

For more information about GIANT STEAM programs and a full list of their workshops, class series, and events, please visit The GIANT Room’s website. 

The GIANT Room is located at 550 West 28th Street. New York, NY.