What Can Technologists Learn from Sesame Street? with Dr. Rosemarie Truglio

• Sesame Street defies media norms with its unique approach to childhood development and psychology in the context of television. When comedy writers, musicians, and puppeteers join forces with experts in developmental psychology and other fields, it’s possible to create meaningful educational content for children.
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• When Sesame Street debuted in 1969, television was a “vast wasteland.” Joan Ganz Cooney, Sesame Street founder and visionary, observed children learning through commercial jingles. That inspired a curriculum-driven model of creating impactful and relevant content for children and the adults in their lives, and it’s still in use today.
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• It is possible to create normative content for children around the world, regardless of culture or geography. Sesame Street is grounded in the learning sciences, which keeps the show focused on what is normative worldwide. Math, science, empathy, and understanding emotions are universal concepts. There's more universality than there is specificity on Sesame Street, and content is localized so that the characters and settings resonate through the appropriate cultural lens.
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• We can apply Sesame Street’s design values to technologies like AI and social media. The care and thought that go into Sesame Street starkly contrasts with the reckless deployment of AI in products children access, like Snap’s My AI chatbot. We can leverage Sesame Workshop’s hard-won lessons about responsible developmental media and education so that we can co-create a media environment in which children - and all of society - can thrive.

Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street

This documentary offers a rare window into the early days of Sesame Street, revealing the creators, artists, writers and educators who together established one of the most influential and enduring children’s programs in television history

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Sesame Street: Ready for School!: A Parent's Guide to Playful Learning for Children Ages 2 to 5 by Dr. Rosemarie Truglio

Rosemarie shares all the research-based, curriculum-directed school readiness skills that have made Sesame Street the preeminent children's TV program

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G Is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street co-edited by Shalom Fisch and Rosemarie Truglio

This volume serves as a marker of the significant role that Sesame Street plays in the education and socialization of young children

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The Democratic Surround by Fred Turner

In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and 1950s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember

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Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Neil Postman’s groundbreaking book about the damaging effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century

Sesame Workshop Identity Matters Study

Explore parents’ and educators’ perceptions of children’s social identity development

Effects of Sesame Street: A meta-analysis of children's learning in 15 countries

Commissioned by Sesame Workshop, the study was led by University of Wisconsin researchers Marie-Louise Mares and Zhongdang Pan

U.S. Parents & Teachers See an Unkind World for Their Children, New Sesame Survey Shows

According to the survey titled, “K is for Kind: A National Survey On Kindness and Kids,” parents and teachers in the United States worry that their children are living in an unkind world