Sesame Workshop, the non-profit that produces Sesame Street and IBM are partnering to produce new personalized learning material for children in preschool grades.

Sesame Workshop and IBM employees are currently working in classrooms and labs to develop “the next generation of learning tools.”

Such learning tools will include products like “super-smart” toys that can adapt to a child’s developmental skills, learn-to-read apps, and classrooms tools for teachers to focus on individual student needs, said Variety Magazine.

Sesame Street solidified itself as a brand name in early educational learning when it studies began to reveal that the popular television show is the “largest and least-costly [early childhood] intervention that’s ever been implemented” in the United States, said researcher and economics professor Phillip Levine to The Atlantic.

The partnership with IBM is aimed at helping Sesame Street continue playing that role in early ed.

"The alliance will combine the content expertise of Sesame Workshop, which has conducted more than 1,000 studies on childhood education, with IBM Watson’s natural-language processing, pattern recognition and other cognitive-computing technologies. The Watson team will refine the educational tools based on testing with anonymized groups of students,” Variety Magazine said.

So far, the partnership is under a three-year agreement to begin the process of changing the way individual students learn at the earliest of ages.

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Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

4/29/2016