See You in San Diego at ASU+GSV 2022

Can you feel the excitement? The buzz of conference-planning is in the air! We’re zooming with friends and colleagues across the country—and beyond!—as we make plans to attend our first in-person event in more than two years.

The Cooney Center is thrilled to participate in this year’s ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego. We’re organizing and hosting some panels with our colleagues at Sesame Workshop, launching a project, and looking forward to talking about education, innovation, and equity!

Come find us and our colleagues at the following sessions: 

TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2022

11:00 am – 11:40 am
COVID, Innovation, and the Future of Early Childhood Education
Will early childhood in five years look like it did five years ago? How has COVID pushed innovation? What’s going to stay and what will go?
Moderated by Michael Levine (Noggin), featuring Alison Bryant (Sesame Workshop), Michelle Kang (NAEYC), and Alejandro Gibes de Gac (Springboard Collaborative)

2:10 pm – 2:50 pm
Playtest with Kids, a New Free Online Resource from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center
“Playtest with Kids” is an online toolkit designed to enable teams to create great products by conducting meaningful research with children. This session will feature tips and best practices by UX researchers who have extensive experience conducting playtesting sessions.
Presented by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. Moderated by Megan Huang (Google) and Maya Sussman (Parent Powered), featuring Mariya dey Roy (Amazon), Jennifer Kotler (Google),  Kiley Sobel (Duolingo), and Cathy Tran (multiple companies).

3:00 pm – 3:40 pm
The Growing Importance of Social & Emotional Development and Learning
The importance of social emotional learning skills in building resiliency for today’s realities and tomorrow’s unknowns. This session will explore ideas related to nurturing the whole child, crisis-mode parenting, and taking a global view.
Moderated by Rosemarie Truglio (Sesame Workshop), featuring Matt Glickman (Promise Venture Studio), Makeda Mays Green (Nickelodeon/Noggin), Mamatha Chary (BEGIN), and Ryan Padrez (The Primary School)

3:00 pm – 3:40 pm
Raising Our Collective Media Consciousness
As children make sense of the world around them, books, social media, pictures, videos, and games are all available at their fingertips, telling them stories about where they come from and who they should be. Kids are constant consumers of implicit and explicit messages that influence their identity development. Join us for a conversation with leaders across the field who are developing tools and practices to help adults raise their own awareness about what’s shared with kids and to help kids build the skills to engage with media consciously.
Moderated by April Montgomery Goble (KIPP Chicago), featuring Michael Preston (Joan Ganz Cooney Center), Linda Burch (Common Sense Media), Brittany Jones (KIPP Chicago), Manjeet Sareen (Natterhub), and Marc Brackett (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence).

3:50 pm – 4:30 pm
Co-design with Kids: Enabling Meaningful Child Participation in the Private Sector in a Digital Era
Join us for a discussion of the imperative to co-design with kids to ensure they are stakeholders throughout the entire development process. Examples of how KidsTeam and other research centers partner with kids to put learning, wellbeing, and DEI at the center of their products + highlight work from upcoming report “Enabling meaningful child participation in the private sector in a digital era,” which makes the case for meaningful child participation in how companies design, develop, and deploy their digital products, services, activities, and initiatives.
Presented by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. Moderated by Michael Preston (Joan Ganz Cooney Center), featuring Jason Yip (University of Washington), Kim Foulds (Sesame Workshop), Rebecca Stringer (Kids Know Best), and Sarah Jacobstein (The LEGO Group)

On Wednesday, Sesame Workshop’s CEO Steve Youngwood will present our co-founders Lloyd Morrisett and Joan Ganz Cooney with Lifetime Achievement Awards at the StageX dinner.

If you’re in San Diego, please join us at any of the sessions here! And if you’re not able to be there in person, registration for the virtual event is free, so you can view keynotes and a curated selection of panels and interviews online.