The GIANT Room partners with Joan Ganz Cooney Center and National University

Dates:

  • Tuesday October 27th, 2025

  • Wednesday October 28th, 2025

  • Thursday October 29th, 2025

Location:

  • Upper West Side YMCA

The GIANT Room partners with Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and National University to co-design their Harmony at Home app. 

The GIANT Room, an innovation hub for children and their families, is honored to announce a partnership with National University, to co-design their Harmony at Home app for children and their families! This project is in collaboration with Joan Ganz Cooney Center from Sesame Workshop.

Families with children between the ages of 4 and 7 years old are invited to join three in-person two-hour workshops at the YMCA on the Upper West Side. During the workshops, participating families will co-design new features, activities, and other content in the app in collaboration with National University 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 National University.

As a result of the program, participating families will have access to a suite of content and family activities designed to enhance family relationships and social emotional well-being, In addition, their ideas shared during the workshops will help design a meaningful resource that will help families foster healthy relationships, belonging, and well-being at home.

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

National University is a company that is dedicated to empowering educators, parents, and nonprofit professionals. They do this through its two core offerings, Harmony Academy and Fundraising Academy. Harmony Academy aims to equip educators with the skills they need to foster knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students and educators need to develop healthy identities, create meaningful relationships, and engage productively with others. Harmony Academy has two branches of product offerings including Harmony Curriculum and Harmony Professional Learning. Fundraising Academy provides nonprofit organizations, school districts, and fundraisers with professional training programs and tools based on the Cause Selling approach to building and retaining donor relationships. Through peer-to-peer and self-paced instruction, our participants develop time-tested relationship-building skills they can apply to their operations now and in the future.

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 SegoviaUWS YMCA