The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is pleased to announce seven new edtech partners for year two of the Cooney Center Sandbox for Literacy Innovations. Supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Sandbox bolsters edtech design with the science of learning and the creative spark of children.
Building on an exciting first year, the Sandbox team selected these new partners from a competitive field of more than 70 applicants, according to Allisyn Levy, the Cooney Center’s senior manager of partnerships and planning. These new partners are developing an array of new edtech tools to support children on their literacy journey, both in the classroom and beyond, ranging from interactive paper storybooks to an AI-powered reading coach to audio games that prompt parent-child conversations to support oral language development.
After an initial product review and assessment, the Sandbox team will conduct consultations with each partner focused on the science of literacy, universal design for learning (UDL), and learner variability (LVN) followed by co-design sessions with children.
“We’re excited to collaborate with such an impressive and varied group of partners who are dedicated to creating literacy tools grounded in current educational research—and who prioritize children’s perspectives from the very beginning of the design process,” said Levy. “Our hope is that this initiative will show impact across the field and motivate others developing kids’ media to embrace similar practices.”
Cali’s Books
Founded in 2016 by Carinne Meyrignac, Cali’s Books is dedicated to nurturing a love of books and reading for joy from the earliest age. The company combines physical books with screen-free technology to create interactive reading experiences. One of its flagship products is the Infinibook reader designed for children ages 3-8. The device connects wirelessly with an expanding collection of specially-designed paper storybooks that can be placed inside it. By pressing buttons on each page, young readers trigger audio narration and interactive elements, such as leveled questions about the story to enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary support.
Backed by funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, Cali’s Books is working to bolster the Infinibook’s early-literacy skill supports and practice, and to make it a product more appropriate for in-school use.
“We know that the Infinibook engages kids with books and motivates them to read, but we want to improve its ability to carefully scaffold important early literacy skills like decoding,” said Anne Blackstock-Bernstein, head of research for Cali’s Books.
One big challenge they hope co-design can help with, for example, is how to encourage kids to read out loud, using the built-in microphone feature to engage adaptive practice of literacy skills and provide feedback on progress. “We hope the Sandbox partnership will help us figure out creative and engaging ways to prompt kids to do this.”
Magpie Literacy
Magpie Literacy was founded in 2021 by Rebecca Kockler, a former assistant superintendent of academics in Louisiana where she revamped the state’s ELA curriculum and assessments, which helped the state earn top-ten status in reading proficiency improvement according to scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Kockler is also the program director at “Reading Reimagined,” a 5-year program at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), which developed literacy learning tools for kids in early elementary school that formed the basis of Magpie Literacy.
Currently, the Magpie team is working to expand its target age-range, by developing an intervention curriculum for grades 3-8, including teacher-led, paper-based lessons for multisyllabic word learning that will be adapted to tech through digital lessons and games, as well as a teacher-led paper component focused on fluency and reading comprehension.
“We view multisyllabic word reading as the best entry point to catch the largest group of students who are still struggling with decoding,” according to Destiny McLurkin, the manager of foundational literacy for Reading Reimagined. The goal is to provide students in grades 3-5 (eventually 3-8) with the decoding instruction many still need to access grade-level texts.
They hope the Sandbox experience will not only help them design games to motivate and engage a wider age-range of children, but also help support multilingual students, and maximize the benefits of reading comprehension questions posed by an avatar rather than a human teacher.
Magpie previously worked with Cooney Center on co-design sessions focused on reluctant readers. “We were enthusiastic about an additional project together,” noted McLurkin. “As this tool in particular will eventually be used with students across a wide age span, we have a strong interest in student input to ensure that it feels engaging and appropriate for the whole age range.”
Khan Academy
The nonprofit Khan Academy has always specialized in filling learning gaps with precisely targeted instruction focused on helping students build mastery through high-quality instruction and personalized learning—from its vast library of bite-sized video lessons for pre-K through college learners to the AI-powered personalized tutoring tool and teaching assistant, Khanmigo, which debuted in 2023. Now, in partnership with the Sandbox, they’re working on an AI-powered “reading coach” to bolster close-reading and comprehension skills among adolescent readers.
Sarah Robertson, a principal product manager at Khan Academy working on the prototype, recalled her time as a middle-school reading teacher where she “learned best practices for teaching close reading strategies with grade-level texts among adolescents with a wide range of reading abilities (without boring them to tears).” After transitioning to edtech, Robertson said, “it became clear that most ELA teachers struggle with close reading instruction specifically, particularly when students are several years behind grade level.”
The reading coach will help teachers craft instructional resources and interactive classroom experiences, differentiate instruction, and provide extra scaffolding when needed using authentic, grade-level texts. Robertson and her colleagues at Khan Academy hope to tackle several challenges with the help of Sandbox experts and co-designers, including how to balance digital learning experiences with live classroom discussion and collaboration.
“We envision teachers using this as a classroom supplemental tool alongside their curriculum to build close reading and textual analysis skills with grade-level texts,” said Robertson. “Teachers could choose from a selection of texts or provide their own and co-craft learning experiences that could include pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading activities both live in class and digitally.”
Creative Media & Research
Oral language development is a crucial building block of literacy, but many parents and caregivers struggle to have lively conversations with young children. To help bridge that gap, the team at Creative Media & Research is developing a digital, audio-only cooperative game that uses puzzles, rhymes, songs, and jokes to prompt kids and their caregivers to communicate and build shared memories through lively back-and-forth interactions. According to company founder, Christine Ricci, who is working in partnership with co-creator Katherine Papazian, the game is meant to be played during everyday moments.
“When parents and kids talk, reminisce, and share stories, they’re strengthening their bond and building the language skills that children need to understand their world,” said Ricci.
She and her colleagues see the Sandbox as an “ideal environment” for refining the product, to ensure its activities not only support oral language skills but lay the foundation for reading skills, and using co-design to investigate how to maximize family engagement in an audio-only cooperative game.
“We are eager to explore how co-design with families can help us meet the needs of diverse learners,” said Ricci. “We look forward to hearing directly from kids and caregivers about what they find most valuable about the experience. What features make a parent-child experience genuinely fun for both adults and kids?”
iCivics
Founded in 2009 by the late Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, iCivics is an online platform that integrates standards-aligned lesson plans on history, civics, and media with interactive games and lessons, mainly for high school and middle school students. In 2022, the company launched its first curriculum geared toward elementary school students, Private i History Detectives, in which students must use primary sources and inquiry skills to answer big questions such as “What does it mean to be a citizen?”
Recent focus groups with elementary school teachers revealed their need to modify the History Detectives social studies curriculum for it to work better with this age group––mainly due to differences in reading level, but also to help fill in background knowledge, and to support English language learners.
According to Taylor Davis, director of curriculum and content at iCivics, the product team heard about the Sandbox in the summer.
“The timing of the Sandbox couldn’t be better,” noted Davis, explaining that the next phase of the product’s development will be guided by the question of how to best design an elementary social studies curriculum that integrates literacy. “The Sandbox literacy experts and opportunity to co-design with kids will be essential inputs to answering this question,” she added, “inputs we hadn’t factored into our original planning.”
Paloma Learning
Paloma Learning CEO, Alejandro Gibes-de-Gac, co-founded the company to bridge a home-school disconnect that he’d first encountered as the son of immigrants navigating America’s educational system and then as a classroom teacher in Philadelphia. Paloma’s mobile app, launched in 2023, aims to harness the untapped potential of at-home learning for K-2 students in Title 1 schools.
The app provides families with daily 15-minute curriculum-aligned lessons, prompted by a text message, in which adults and children work together on new literacy and math skills. At the end of each literacy session, Paloma’s human writers and educators—supported by their internal AI model—create a decodable story based on a topic the child has selected, merging academic skills with the child’s personal interests. In addition, they visually render children as protagonists in their own stories.
More than two thirds of the Paloma team are people of color and many are first-generation college graduates, immigrants, or public-school teachers. “This is more than a moral stance, it’s a product strength,” said Gibes-de-Gac. “Our lived experiences allow us to design a product that’s not only usable, but deeply resonant for the families we serve.”
Paloma’s Sandbox focus will be on bolstering supports for caregivers who aren’t native English speakers, delivering adaptive content that is challenging without being overwhelming, and exploring the possibility of expanding their literacy lessons beyond decoding.
ExploreLearning | Learning A-Z
For more than two decades, Learning A-Z has provided teachers and students with a growing portfolio of high-quality solutions for differentiated instruction, including thousands of digital and printable texts, instructional resources, activities, interactive games, quizzes, and assessments. In Raz-Plus, their K-5 literacy solution, students progress through assignments, activities, and independent reading, earning badges as well as stars they can redeem for fun extras such as customizing avatars or converting them into charitable donations.
Earlier this year, Learning A-Z came together with the education technology company ExploreLearning. The newly combined company has joined the Cooney Center Sandbox as they undertake an evolution of Raz-Plus that will include integrating it with their new solution, Foundations A-Z, giving access to a library of practical K-5 resources with equal instructional emphasis on foundational skills and reading comprehension to support and enhance whole-class instruction, small groups, classroom centers, and independent practice. Their goal is to ensure that the final product is cohesive and aligned with the science of reading to support a wide range of students, including multilingual and striving learners currently reading below grade level. Among their design focus areas will be learner variability, agency, and accessibility, as well as prototyping and testing features that prioritize intrinsic motivation and student ownership of learning.
“Sandbox aligns with how we want to grow: by translating literacy science into intuitive, developmentally appropriate experiences and by designing with, not just for, the children we serve,” noted Seija Surr, senior vice president of product strategy for ExploreLearning | Learning A-Z.
“A year from now, we hope to have embedded new methods of working that place student experience and learning science at the center of our design practice.”
The Cooney Center team is excited to collaborate with these partners and the children in the co-design sessions in 2026. We invite you to learn more about the Cooney Center Sandbox and follow us on LinkedIn. Please sign up for the Cooney Center newsletter for more updates.
