Permit me to introduce you to a couple of our Irish friends. The big purple one you see on the left in the picture above is Potto Monster. He’s a jovial, caring, slightly neurotic inventor. The redhead with the big ears on the right is Hilda the Hare. She’s a rambunctious and energetic Irish Hare. And they’re the best friends who populate Sesame Tree, our adaptation of Sesame Street, produced for the children of Northern Ireland.

‘Potto’s Heard of Cows,’ episode 7 of the second season of Sesame Tree, centers on a pop-up book of animals, which creeps-out Potto to no end. When he turns a page and up pops a white, wooly sheep, Potto shrieks and ducks for cover.

“What is it, Potto?” Hilda asks.

“That sweater has a face!” Potto cries.

(Of course, as this is a series made for Northern Ireland, the clothing item is called a “jumper,” not a “sweater,” but I’ve translated it to a more local, American dialect for the sake of this blog.)

 That sweater has a face. A pretty amusing joke, if I do say so myself. Not that I wrote the joke or anything, but I did have a hand in its creation, by killing the originally written joke.

As Sesame Workshop’s Associate Producer on the Sesame Tree series, part of my job was to help train the local Irish creative and production team in all things Sesame: the unique Sesame model, process, culture, characters, attitude … the whole shebang. The goal being that the finished product, Sesame Tree in this case, feels like a cohesive part of the “longest street in the world,” Sesame Street.

Part of this training process includes reviewing and commenting on early drafts of scripts. My colleagues and I make a concerted effort not to be overbearing in our comments, and we take special care to be sensitive to the differing social and cultural norms of the country we’re producing the Sesame adaptation for. Even so, it is inevitable that sometimes a joke is going to get killed.

In this case, the originally written joke didn’t involve a sheep at all. It was a jellyfish. Originally, Potto turns the page of his pop-up book of animals, and up jumps a picture of a jellyfish, at which he screams in fright.

“Potto, it’s just a jellyfish,” Hilda says to him.

“A jellyfish?” Potto responds, “But it looks like a sneeze!”

It looks like a sneeze … a jellyfish looks like a sneeze?

When I first read the joke in the first draft of the ‘Potto’s Heard of Cows’ script, I had to pause a moment, and think about it. Yes, I realized, if the sneeze results in the release of a large amount of mucus, I guess it could look a little like a jellyfish. And indeed, once I had thought about it for a while, I thought it a funny idea, if also a little gross. During the script review meeting with Veronica Wulff, Sesame Workshop Producer, and Natascha Crandall, Director of Educational Content, we all were of the same mind: kill the joke.

“Sorry, Danny, snot jokes aren’t very ‘Sesame,’” my kill comment began in our first draft notes.

“Let alone the fact that we can’t expect the young audience to connect the idea of a sneeze resulting in so much snot that it happens to look like a jellyfish – an animal a lot of children might not even recognize. Please use an animal more normal to a child.”

And like that, the jellyfish became a sheep, and the sneeze became a sweater with eyes. It was simpler, and funnier. A joke that was originally too abstract for our young audience became more accessible, all the while maintaining the absurdity of Potto Monster’s character. In my mind, our comment had done Danny Nash, the writer, a favor. It had resulted in a better joke. The episode turned out to be one he could be proud of. Everyone seemed happy with the change, and no feathers had gotten ruffled. Production moved on. The Sesame Workshop international adaptation process had worked again.

Or so I thought.

“You killed my favorite joke!” Danny told me with exaggerated outrage.

It had been about two years since ‘Potto’s Head of Cows’ was first broadcast, and it had receded well into the back of back of my memory of past projects. Danny was visiting New York, so I’d taken him to one of my favorite Greek restaurants, well off the beaten path of Times Square tourists. Now Danny had decided to interrupt this casual dinner amongst former colleagues to confront me about something that’s been eating at him for a long time: I killed his favorite joke. The jellyfish looking like a sneeze was his favorite joke!

I was completely set aback.

“Your favorite joke? Really?”

So I repeat the standard line that we’d established with our script notes two years previous: It was a good joke – funny – for adults. But Sesame Tree was for kids, and jellyfish just aren’t familiar animals to most kids, and the idea that a jellyfish might look like a mound of snot would be even less familiar.

“Unfamiliar to American kids, maybe.” Danny told me.

He proceeded to explain a joke which only the Irish – whether child or adult – could properly get.

Danny asked me to imagine a parent and young child in America, walking along a beach and coming across the familiar sight of jellyfish, slimy-looking sludge, washed up onto the shore.

“What’s that?” the child asks.

The parent, being playful, might answer: “Why, it’s seal snot.”

To which the child would laugh at the silly idea and say, “No it’s not!”

(And maybe the parent, if cheeky, would reply: “Yes, it’s snot!”)

“But that joke would not happen like that in Ireland.” Danny continues.

“In Ireland, seal snot is exactly what that jellyfish on the beach is. Exactly!”

Once Danny has made sure that he had me completely confused, he continues.

“In Irish – not in English – in Irish, the name for jellyfish is ‘smugairle roin,’ which literally means ‘seal snot.’ It’s a joke, embedded in the Irish language itself!

So, in Ireland, when a parent and child walk along a beach and come across jellyfish, a parent can say: “Look! A seal must have a cold!”

And the child would get it!

(And maybe the child, if clever, would run with the joke and say: “Yeah! He’s sneezed all over the beach!”)

With that explanation, all was clear to this ignorant American, and I apologized to Danny for killing his favorite joke.

A darn good joke it was too. Seal snot, and all.

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Chamki from India's Galli Galli Sim Sim entertains and educates children on the streets of Delhi.

Marie-Louise Mares is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sesame Street has always been unique in terms of how much research goes into designing each episode and evaluating how effective the program is. That research happens not only in the US, but also for the various versions of Sesame Street around the globe. Extraordinary amounts of work go on, conducting research studies in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, China, India, Tanzania, Mexico…

I didn’t do any of that work. But what I have done over the past two years, together with my colleague, Zhongdang Pan, at University of Wisconsin-Madison, is do research on that research. Sesame Workshop turned over all those studies that were conducted in countries outside the US and we read them all, and coded the types of learning and the context, and recorded the statistical findings from each study. We coded how rigorous the study was, and how carefully the outcomes were measured. We then combined and analyzed all that information to get a picture of the effects of Sesame Street around the globe, including in some of the world’s poorest regions.

It took a long time. My hair is a lot greyer than it used to be. But Pan and I found significant, positive effects of preschool-aged children’s viewing of Sesame Street. Not for every kid in every study for every outcome (of course!). But across all those studies there was a real effect – on average, those children who watched Sesame Street knew more letters and numbers, knew more about the world around them (including health and safety information), and had more positive attitudes toward other social groups than those who didn’t watch.

This is impressive. Other research indicates that it’s really hard to create early educational interventions that are effective and can be scaled up to reach more than a handful of children. There are literally millions of children around the world who watch Sesame Street. Our findings suggest that doing so makes a real, measurable difference in their skills and knowledge.

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Since November 2011, Baghch-E-Simsim, the Afghan version of Sesame Street, has brought laughter and important lessons about literacy, numeracy and cultural awareness to the children of Afghanistan. We’re excited to share with you this behind-the-scenes look at how one of our newest international co-productions gets made. To learn more about how Baghch-E-Simsim gets made, click here. To learn more about our work in Afghanistan, click here.

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Sesame Workshop is best known for our commitment to the mental and emotional development of children around the world. But we’re also committed to the physical safety of children. That’s why, as part of the U.N.’s Decade of Action for Road Safety, we’ve launched a new major road safety campaign in Australia.

Between 2006 and 2008, there were 6 deaths and 430 seriously injured pedestrians aged 0-14 in the province of Victoria alone. Driveway run-overs in the province resulted in the death of 14 children under the age of six and 73 serious injuries between January 2000 and September 2012.

Our campaign, spearheaded by Sesame Street’s Elmo and Grover, hopes to educate children, parents and teacher on simple road safety practices so in the future children’s lives can be saved. The campaign, created in partnership with Australian child safety advocates Kidsafe, the TAC, RACV and Holden, includes a storybook entitled Elmo Stays Safe: How Furry Little Monsters – and Children – Play Safely. The stories, games and activities in the book help encourage important safety tips like holding a parents hand while crossing the street, treating driveways like roads instead of safe play spaces and using correct restraints when traveling in a car. Additionally, a Community Service Announcement featuring Elmo and Grover is being broadcast on television and social media platforms and urges children and families to play in safe places away from driveways and roads.

To learn more about our efforts to encourage road safety, click here.

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Afghan children in Herat province listen to Baghch-e-Simsim with their mothers.

While Sesame Workshop is best known for the educational television programs we produce both in the United States and around the world, we believe many forms of technology, both old and new, can be an effective way of bringing learning and laughter to children. That’s why an accompanying radio production has been a big part of the success of Baghch-e-Simsim, the Afghan version of Sesame Street. In Afghanistan many households don’t have television; the radio broadcast allows us to ensure that lessons about literacy, numeracy and cultural understanding reach as many children in the country as possible.

In the United States, when we mention iconic Sesame Street Muppets like Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, images of the characters immediately come to mind. But for the children whose only contact with the characters is the Baghch-e-Simsim radio program, they have to imagine what the characters look like. Periodically, around special events like festivals or the New Year, Afghan children send in drawings of Baghch-e-Simsim to the radio stations it airs on and we get a chance to see how their imaginations have brought the show to life. Equal Access, Sesame Workshop’s Afghanistan based radio production partner of Baghch-e-Simsim, sent us some of the children’s drawings they had received, and we wanted to share them with you.

A drawing by Noorina Atta Zada in Kabul province.

A drawing sent in by Jalal ud din in Nangarhar province

Drawings by Nazifa and Shafiq, children in the Nanagar province of Afghanistan.

A drawing of the classic Sesame Street characters by Muhammad Imran, a child in Kapisa, Afghanistan.

A drawing by Kamran and Umer, two children from Nangarhar province.

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Congratulations to the entire Sesamstrasse team for making young children in Germany laugh and learn for the last 40 years.

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This article originally appeared on the Sesame Workshop India site. VisitSesameWorkshopIndia.org to learn more about Galli Galli Sim Sim and all the wonderful work Sesame Workshop India does to improve the lives of and educate the children of India.

Sesame Workshop in India is committed to sustainable projects that enrich children’s lives long after our work is complete. We do this through partnerships, local development, and by investing in the furry heart of our programs—the puppeteers themselves.

Folk traditions of string puppets and shadow puppetry flourished in India long before our Galli Galli Sim Sim television show arrived in 2006. Yet the program’s Muppets represent something new: a sense of humor and emotional depth that connects powerfully with children and opens them to all types of learning.

It’s this quality that attracted actor Manish Sachdeva, whose work with Sesame Street in India has transformed into an enduring passion. Despite having no puppetry experience before his audition for Galli Galli Sim Sim, Manish was chosen from among 2,000 actors to begin training with master Muppeteers from Sesame Street in the U.S. Learning the unusual art of video puppetry took weeks of hands-on mentorship and many rounds of video critiques.

Manish’s character Boombah the Lion is a playful big brother known to a generation of Indian children. Even during training, Manish was urged to explore Boombah’s persona and make him as real as possible. “I started asking ‘What’s his chemistry with other characters? What does he think?’” recalls Manish. “As an artist, you play with it and make it your own.”

The experience—artistic, technical, and social—was excellent preparation for Manish’s next big role. At the end of his tenure on Galli Galli Sim Sim, he started building his own puppets and a company of artists to bring them to life—The Puppet Studio. In its first year, the group produced numerous videos, hosted workshops for children and aspiring puppeteers, and staged an all-puppet version of “The Wizard of Oz.” And Manish is dreaming even bigger, with ambitions for a feature film and TV series that expand the legacy of Muppets in India.

By investing in puppeteers like Manish, Sesame Workshop in India is helping to nurture an art form that can move people in profound ways, giving a voice not only to artists but to children who might otherwise have none.

Living proof is Ghazal Javed, the voice and hands behind Chamki, the much-loved star of Galli Galli Sim Sim. India’s leading woman puppeteer, Ghazal’s career with Sesame Street in India started during her final college exams in 2005. She’s been immersed in puppetry ever since, parlaying her time on the show into a dizzying array of projects, including scriptwriting, documentaries, a soap opera, performing at the Cricket World Cup, and a high-profile government campaign to promote girls’ education.

But her most rewarding work, she says, happens more quietly. In 2011, Ghazal and her partner, who plays the character Googly on Galli Galli Sim Sim, brought a month-long puppet workshop to an orphanage in the embattled region of Kashmir. Working with children whose lives have been torn apart by war, Ghazal worked to create a safe space for them to share their stories.

Ghazal recalls one girl who wrote about how her father was gunned down by militants. At first, she struggled through tears to put words to her tale. Then she picked up a puppet.

“She grabbed this puppet, which she made,” Ghazal says, “and she stood up in front of everyone. She told about losing her parents and how she came to the orphanage. She didn’t flinch. She did it all confidently—with a smile.”

Behold the power of puppets.

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This article originally appeared on the Sesame Workshop India site. Visit SesameWorkshopIndia.org to learn more about Galli Galli Sim Sim and all the wonderful work Sesame Workshop India does to improve the lives of and educate the children of India.

As India surges on the global stage, early education here has never been more important. With 165 million children under age 8, India’s preschools face a daunting task: creating a new generation of global citizens with creative minds and critical-thinking skills that can help the country continue to thrive and compete.

Indian families are eager to give their children the best advantages in a highly competitive world. But India’s current system struggles to deliver. While there are pockets of excellence among India’s preschools, major gaps exist in availability and quality. In many places, preschool lessons are a downward extension of the primary curriculum, relying on memorization and a didactic teaching style that aren’t appropriate for the youngest learners.

To help meet the booming demand for quality education in India, we’re taking our mission into a new arena: Sesame Schoolhouse. This unique social enterprise uses a franchise model to bring world-class early childhood education everywhere it’s needed, at a price that’s reasonable for Indian families.

Developed especially for the needs of children ages 2 to 8, Sesame Schoolhouse creates a continuum of learning through two complementary programs. Sesame Schoolhouse instills the essential building blocks of critical thinking, creativity and curiosity in children 2 to 5. After they enter primary school, we expand on this foundation with hands-on science and math enrichment at Afterschool.

Sesame Schoolhouse was developed through an approach that’s made Sesame Street an icon of engaging education. We put the child at the center of everything we do. We believe that all children have unique potential that should be encouraged. And we know that for children to excel in today’s complex and technology-driven world, they need a new set of tools—social and emotional skills, critical thinking and creativity.

That’s what our Sesame Schoolhouse initiative is all about. Built around the lovable Muppets of Galli Galli Sim Sim, the experience unites highly trained teachers, a lively classroom environment, and collaborative projects that nurture the whole child. Our preschools address six areascritical to early childhood development—cognition, language, social, emotional, physical and cultural diversity—in line with India’s National Curriculum Framework.

A recent global ranking of students’ reading, math and science abilities placed India near the very bottom of the list. We’re working to reverse this trend with Sesame Street Afterschool. Our new enrichment program builds strong foundations in science, math and critical thinking for children ages 6 to 8. Four hours a week, kids engage with scientific concepts through exploratory games and hands-on activities that foster creativity, problem-solving skills, and a sense of curiosity about the world.

How do we know these programs work? Our process is grounded in 40 years of research and proven impact. Numerous studies tell us that children who are exposed to Sesame Street content are more confident, active, curious and inclusive. In short, they’re better prepared for school and life. And this commitment to research is ongoing: we’re already studying how to make our school experience more effective.

Sesame Schoolhouse preschool and afterschool programs are anticipated to open across Northern India in Spring 2012. Each location receives complete training, curriculum guidelines, and classroom materials from Sesame Workshop in India. This sustainable approach ensures our energizing brand of learning can thrive wherever there’s a need. The business will expand to reach families across India within ten years.

That’s excellent news for millions of active and curious little minds, and for India’s next big act on the global stage.

To learn more about our preschools visit www.sesameschoolhouse.in

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U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Sesame Workshop CEO Melvin H. Ming and Takalani Sesame's Kami

Throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia there are numerous health risks that threaten women and children. Diarrhea, pneumonia, malnutrition and obesity extend across borders and impact millions. That’s why we are reaffirming and deepening our commitment to the United Nation Secretary General’s Every Woman Every Child movement. The movement aims to mobilize and intensify global efforts to improve the health of women and children around the world.

In addition to its support for Every Woman Every Child, Sesame Workshop is seeking to collaborate with organizations to help support an unprecedented new global health initiative, “Healthy Children, Health Lives Around the World.” Through this program Sesame workshop will aim to improve the lives of millions of women and children by harnessing the power of educational media and the enduring charm of the Sesame Street Muppets to promote health awareness, knowledge and positive health choices globally.

As part of our support for Every Woman, Every Child, Sesame Workshop has produced a public service announcement featuring Kami from Takalani Sesame, the South African version of Sesame Street, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

“I am deeply grateful to Sesame Workshop for lending its creativity, passion and global popularity to Every Woman Every Child, which is working to save millions of lives,” said Ban Ki-moon. “I am proud to partner with Kami and her friends, who can advance the global health agenda around the world in ways I never could.  I hope others will join our global movement for the health of every woman and every child.”

Sesame Workshop’s approach brings together local educators, child development specialists, researchers, producers, writers, and artists to develop programs that meet the developmental needs of children in a particular country or region. In Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, we produce multimedia initiatives promoting general health and hygiene. In South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho, our multimedia campaign is working towards ensuring parents, children and educators have all the information they need to combat HIV and AIDS as well as respect those already afflicted. And in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, our multimedia approach is working to make sure that parents and children have all the information necessary to practice water safety, hygiene and good nutrition.

“For 43 years, Sesame Workshop has been making a meaningful difference in the lives of children by addressing their critical developmental needs through innovative and engaging educational content,” said H. Melvin Ming, President and CEO of Sesame Workshop. “We’ve reached hundreds of millions children and families in over 150 countries worldwide, including many who would otherwise have no access to early childhood education.”

Click here to learn more about the work Sesame Workshop does to improve the lives of children around the world.

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Dr. Fuster, who hails from Barcelona, Spain, is the former president of the American Heart Association and the World Heart Foundation. As the Chair of the Committee on Preventing the Global Epidemic of Cardiovascular Disease for the Institute of Medicine (IOM), he is a prominent advocate for cardiovascular health around the globe.

Barrio Sésamo’s Dr. Ruster may not be as achieved as his real life inspiration, but he’s equally dedicated to helping keep hearts healthy. In the Muppet doctor’s own words, “I have dedicated myself to that miraculous, beautiful organ… the heart!  My heart jumps at the chance to spend time with my furry friends in Barrio Sésamo. We love to exercise and eat scrumptious fruits and veggies together. But most of all, I just love to talk to my friends helping them get to the heart of any matter.”

Dr. Fuster, who first collaborated with Sesame Workshop in 2006 to promote cardiovascular health in Colombia, serves as an international advisor on Sesame Workshop’s Global Health Initiative. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death around the world, and the goal of the initiative is to measure health improvements in children and build global partnerships to address their critical health issues. Many studies show that childhood obesity leads to cardiovascular disease, thru an increase in cardiovascular disease risk factors such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol. In 2010 the number of overweight children under the age of five globally was estimated to be over 42 million.

To learn more about Dr. Fuster and the work he does to promote cardiovascular health, visit MountSinai.org.

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