Sesame Workshop and IBM Watson today announced that it is creating a vocabulary app and the Sesame Workshop Intelligent Play and Learning Platform. The new platform will be used by Sesame Workshop and IBM to create a series of cognitive apps, games, and toys to help kids learn.
News today is the first public action announced from the partnership first formed more than a year ago.
The platform will run on IBM Cloud and invite the “ecosystem of software developers, researchers, educational toy companies, and educators to tap IBM Watson cognitive capabilities and Sesame Workshop’s early childhood expertise to build engaging experiences to help advance children’s education and learning,” according to a statement from IBM Watson.
“Our show, when we first started 45 years ago it was basically using the technology of the day that was TV to give all kids access to high quality education,” Sesame Workshop COO Steve Youngwood told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
Now the company is working on things like tutor assistants and apps for personalized education and other tools to helps kids learn and augment intelligence.
“The basis of the partnership when we formed it a year ago was you take the cognitive computing power of Watson and the early childhood expertise of Sesame and you bring them together to create adaptive and personalized platforms and products that ideally transform education both in schools and at home through apps and games and eventually though items like educational toys,” he said.
Part of the partnership has been joint research. A trial program for use of the vocabulary app will begin this fall at Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia.
