The GIANT Room partners with Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Paloma Learning

Dates:

  • Tuesday May 19, 2026

  • Wednesday May 20, 2026

  • Wednesday May 21, 2026

Location:

  • School in the Upper West Side, NYC

The GIANT Room has partnered with Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and Paloma to co-design their app!  

The GIANT Room, an innovation hub for children and their families, is honored to announce a partnership with Paloma, to co-design their app “Paloma Learning”! This project is in collaboration with Joan Ganz Cooney Center from Sesame Workshop, and funded by Walton Family Foundation. We are bringing together diverse groups of families with researchers and industry innovators to put parental and caregiver involvement in their child’s academic success at the center of product development. Families with children in 1st and 2nd grade will be invited to join us for three FREE sessions of playtesting and co-designing the Paloma Learning app. These free in-person two-hour workshops will take place at a school in the Upper West Side in New York City. 

During the session, children and caregivers will be building interactive activities and providing feedback that will help make meaningful changes to the Paloma Learning app. Participants will have the opportunity to meet the platform’s designers and collaborate on creating these new features and activities. 

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 families  involved in the design process. These co-design partnerships not only provide opportunities for children to meet and build prototypes with real designers from industry, but also make it possible to create reading and family engagement resources that millions of families around the world can engage and connect with.

Paloma is a mobile app that helps K-2 families build the habit of tutoring their kids for 15 daily minutes. Parents deliver rigorous, curriculum-aligned, and joyful instruction daily at home. Over the course of a school year, this adds up to 1,000 extra hours of one-on-one instruction for every classroom!​ “Paloma awakens the sleeping giant of parents as tutors.” 

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.

Location: YMCA Upper West Side, New York, NY. 

Date & Time: May 12th, 13th, and 14th from 4:30pm-6:30pm

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

CoDesign ProgramMaru Eugenia Segovia