The GIANT Room partners with Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Magpie Literacy

Dates:

  • Tuesday January 27th, 2026

  • Wednesday January 28th, 2026

  • Thursday January 29th, 2026

Location:

  • New York Public School in Upper West Side

The GIANT Room has partnered with Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and a PK-8 literacy company, Magpie Literacy, to co-design new game mechanics for their literacy game.

The GIANT Room, an innovation hub for children and their families, is honored to announce a partnership with Magpie Literacy, to co-design a series of literacy games for upper elementary grades! This project is in collaboration with Joan Ganz Cooney Center from Sesame Workshop, and funded by Walton Family Foundation.

Fifth and sixth graders will be invited to join three in-person two-hour workshops at a public school in New York City. During the workshops, participating youth will co-design a set of reading games, motivation mechanics, and personalization features in collaboration with Magpie Literacy designers, JGCC and The GIANT Room’s researcher and educators.  Following the workshop sessions, GIANT and JGCC researchers will analyze youth ideas, synthesize findings, and transform them  into actionable product recommendations for designers at Magpie Literacy.

As a result of the program, participating youth will learn and practice design thinking, ideation, hands-on prototyping, sharing and receiving feedback,  while   collaborating with industry designers. In turn, their ideas will help design impactful and engaging literacy games to be played by thousands, or even millions of kids, around the world. 

The GIANT Room believes the most engaging and effective learning experiences are the ones that are designed with students’ point of view in mind, and even better, those that are designed with children involved in the design process. These co-design partnerships not only provide opportunities for children to meet and build prototypes with real designers from leading media companies, but also make it possible to create learning applications that thousands of classrooms  around the world can use as an effective learning resource.

Magpie Literacy is a literacy company that is on a mission to unlock the great reader in every child to end illiteracy in our country. They are developing research-based, identity-affirming PK-8+ digital literacy tools that leverage student uniquenesses to help every child master the foundational reading skills needed to become strong, confident readers. They are currently working on developing a scalable, impactful reading product that will help them stop illiteracy in America.

Named for the co-founder and visionary behind Sesame Street, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is an independent research and innovation lab within Sesame Workshop that advances positive futures for kids in the digital world. They conduct research on emerging technologies and collaborate with technologists, digital media producers, and educators to put this research into action to support children’s learning and well-being. Joan Ganz Cooney Center also works directly with policy makers and investors to drive national conversations and decisions that help children thrive within the digital world.

For more information about GIANT co-design programs please visit The GIANT Room’s DesignLab page.

CoDesign ProgramMaru Eugenia Segovia