The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is delighted to introduce four new edtech product partners to the Sandbox for Literacy innovations. With support from the Walton Family Foundation, the Sandbox supports edtech design by combining expertise in the science of learning with the creativity of children.
These four edtech product partners are developing a wide range of new tools to help students learn in and out of school, including adaptive supports to help students with learning difficulties master grade-level content, AI-powered reading fluency assessment, immersive STEM learning adventures, and an app that encourages parent-child play.
“We’re excited to welcome our newest partners who share a commitment to designing literacy products grounded in current pedagogy and shaped by kids themselves, from the earliest stages of design,” said Allisyn Levy, the Cooney Center’s senior manager of partnerships and planning. “Together with these teams, we’re really digging into how products can be designed to benefit specific communities of learners, ensuring an authentic experience.”
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, and learner variability, followed by co-design sessions with children in the target demographic for their product.
“We can’t wait to see what they build,” said Levy, “and what the edtech field can learn from their work.”
Seesaw
In 2024, Seesaw added an AI-powered reading fluency assessment to their literacy platform’s suite of multimodal learning and creation tools, digital portfolios, teacher dashboards, and family engagement features. Students record themselves reading text uploaded by the teacher or a personalized AI-created passage tailored to a specific grade level and topic, and the tool analyzes that recording to give teachers a quick assessment of reading fluency skills, including a transcript, common errors, words correct per minute, and the number of attempts. Teachers can also include comprehension questions for students to answer after recording themselves.
By creating an automated option for running records, the reading fluency tool can free up teachers to spend more time teaching, interacting directly and effectively with students. The Seesaw team has already made multiple enhancements to the reading fluency tool, based on teacher feedback and classroom observations. But they aim to use their time in the Sandbox to further strengthen the product on multiple fronts. First, they want to improve the student experience by reducing their anxiety about reading aloud, offering more support to struggling readers, and giving students some additional insights and encouragement to help them improve. Second, they want to make the teacher-facing data and assessments both faster and more actionable.
“With a fluency check in Seesaw, teachers can then quickly identify student needs and respond with targeted instruction,” said Claire Voigtlander, Seesaw’s product manager. “How can we clearly surface the most important information, and consider literacy instruction best practices, to help teachers easily see student progress over time?”
Finally, they hope to explore the potential for the tool to offer insights and assessments of a student’s reading progress to families and to the students themselves, given how strongly the research links fluency growth with at-home reading practice and family engagement.
“We’re excited about the opportunity to bring teachers and students into the process more collaboratively and learn from their perspectives earlier and more directly,” said Voigtlander.
Medley
A team of educators created Medley as a browser extension that adds adaptive, academic scaffolds, such as vocabulary support, translation, and text engineering (a strategy that embeds scaffolds directly into text to increase comprehension), to existing instructional materials, making grade-level content more accessible without reducing rigor.
Now they want to expand that model to help students with learning challenges such as dyslexia and ADHD. This planned expansion followed multiple requests from educators, whose feedback has always been key to the product’s development, according to Natasha Kaufman, Medley’s director of growth and operations.
“While many of the underlying principles are similar,” said Kaufman, “students with disabilities require different supports.”
The Medley team was already familiar with the Sandbox because its founder, Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, had previously co-designed with the Cooney Center during his time as president of Mrs Wordsmith, a provider of game-based literacy products ranging from picture books to card games to video games. According to Kaufman, “The Sandbox offers exactly the kind of environment we need to thoughtfully expand—helping us learn directly from students, educators, and experts as we determine which supports are most valuable and how they should be designed.”
Kai XR
Veteran teacher Kai Frazier aims to help students see how the STEM lessons they learn in class connect to real people, careers, and possibilities.
“I wanted to give students a way to experience more of the world from wherever they were,” said Frazier, founder and CEO of Kai XR, an experiential learning platform for elementary and middle school students that lets them practice STEM in the real world. Each “STEM Adventure” combines virtual field trips, discovery games, and 3D Makerspaces to help students see how real people use STEM in real places and across real careers.
Throughout, students read to find the information they need to make decisions and solve real-world STEM challenges. In fact, a recent independent study found that students said that completing the learning adventures in Kai XR made them want to read more.
“One of the things that excites me most is that students are already telling us that Kai XR gives them a reason to read,” said Frazier. “We want to better understand what is driving that motivation and how we can build on it to support even more students, including those reading at different levels.”
Frazier is eager to tap into the research-backed science-of-learning expertise of the Sandbox, but she’s particularly excited to hear directly from students. Indeed, Frazier has spent the last two years visiting schools across Alabama to better understand what it takes for a product like Kai XR to work in real classrooms.
“I did not want to design from a distance,” said Frazier. “That commitment to listening, learning, and designing with students is a big part of what we are excited to bring into the Sandbox.”
Toogs
“Toogs grew out of our own experience as parents, and out of nearly a decade building interactive learning technology impacting thousands of students,” said founder and CEO, Emilie Joly. “We kept seeing the same thing: most children’s technology is built for a child alone with a screen, when the research is clear that young children learn and develop best through relational, back-and-forth interaction.”
This mobile and tablet app invites kids and their parents to create, draw, and tell stories together, turning everyday play into shared learning moments. The app recognizes real-world inputs, such as scribbles, drawings, gestures, and objects, and it scores each activity against a learning framework for emerging literacy, numeracy, and social emotional skills, adapting for each child over time and giving parents suggestions and information on the games and activities they just played.
Currently offering three activities in a controlled beta launch, Toogs plans to grow the library to more than 60 games sorted by age and topic. During their time in the Sandbox, the product team aims to explore how the science of early literacy can be embedded into activities that are co-played (rather than solo experiences), to learn how well the skills they support, such as oral language, vocabulary, storytelling, print awareness, and listening comprehension, really reflect development, and to apply universal design for learning to ensure that Toogs’ activities work across a wide range of children, languages, and cultures.
“We’re a Public Benefit Corporation and our underlying mission is to build better children’s media that focuses as much on the development of relational intelligence as it does on the science of learning,” said Joly. “We’d love the Sandbox’s help thinking through how literacy and the parent-child bond reinforce each other.”
The Cooney Center is looking forward to working with our newest partners through literacy consultations and co-design work with children in the coming months. 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.
