Teaching children about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as the STEM subjects, is an imperative we here at Sesame Street take seriously.  STEM is not just a major part of the television show’s curriculum; Sesame Workshop makes print books, e-books, and mobile apps aimed at teaching young children about STEM.

Teaching STEM is a passion of ours, which is why we approached Ridgefield Academy in Connecticut to see if any of their teachers wanted to use our book Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends, published by Dover Publications, in the classroom. That’s when we were introduced to Jerry Nash, a science teacher a Ridgefield who saw a way to take this teaching opportunity a step further.

He had his eighth grade students at Ridgefield Academy film the first graders who conducted the experiments. Then he had a group of third and fifth graders do a voice-over for an instructional science video he made. We were blown away by the time and effort Mr. Nash put into bringing Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends to life. We wanted to feature a few clips from the video (see above) in the hopes that teachers and parents might be inspired to think about new ways they can make science fun and relevant for young children.

If you would like to learn more about Ridgefield Academy and the great educational work they do, click here. If you want to get a copy of Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends, click here. And Mr. Nash wanted to let you know if you have any questions about his approach to teaching science, you can reach him here.

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How would you update a classic? Take a treasured story from one era and spruce it up for a new century’s readers?

Sesame Workshop has produced over 1200 books in a variety of formats since the early 1970s. Part of the philosophy of our publishing group is the willingness to tell stories in whatever formats will attract and reach preschoolers. Animated book apps and e-books are the most recent formats in which Sesame Street characters have come to life. For the Workshop, an eagerness to create books in emerging digital formats is tempered by the need to balance innovation with our mission of education. It is a delicate balancing act, but one that the Workshop’s publishing group has pulled off time and time again.

In September, Sesame Workshop partnered with Callaway Digital Arts to produce an app version of the classic storybook The Great Cookie Thief. The story of The Great Cookie Thief originally aired as a Muppet segment on Sesame Street in 1971. Later the script became the basis for a storybook published in 1977 by Western Publishing. The story takes place in an Old West watering hole where residents talk about their collective problem: a thief who has been stealing the town’s cookies. Townfolk compare the attributes of a suspicious character (Cookie Monster) with an image on a wanted poster to determine if he is indeed the Great Cookie Thief.

In the process of transforming the show segment into a book, editors needed to capture the spirit of the story while meeting the curriculum goals of literacy and relational concepts (comparing objects).

Work on a book involves a lot of give and take. There are complex negotiations between illustrators, authors and editors to balance the creative vision for the book with what is appropriate and educational for young readers. When I pulled files from Sesame’s archive, illustrator Michael Smollin’s early sketches revealed notes from the book’s editors, asking him to rethink scenes with cowboys gambling, remove a cowboy’s pistol, and make sure only milk was served at the bar.

Illustrations also needed to remain consistent throughout. The fringe on a cowboy’s shirt, stitching on boots and the placement of the wanted posters needed to look the same from spread to spread.

The most notable request from the editors was for stronger female representation. When The Great Cookie Thief aired on Sesame Street, no female Muppets were written into the script – only cowboys and Cookie Monster. In a memo to Workshop editor Anna Jane Hayes, the team at Western Publishing was passionate about filling that gap: “We are very much concerned with avoiding sexism in our books and hope to include nothing that might seem to be demeaning to women. Therefore, we ask that you take special care in your presentation of the “dancing girls” here. … It is important also, that at least one more woman be included in a position of importance – as a cowgirl with a speaking part.”

The use of speech balloons was an effective way to use dialogue originally written for the show. Yet the placement of speech balloons affects how well young readers follow and understand the story. Editors repeatedly questioned: Do the balloons respond to each other and make sense? The positioning of the tail on a speech balloon could make all the difference in understanding who was talking. Use of overlapping balloons helped make it obvious when two sentences needed to be read in sequence.

When the Great Cookie Thief was adapted for an app, characters were re-drawn digitally, animated, and given voices. New technologies meant more interactivity between the reader and the story, so additional lines of dialogue were written to prompt the reader to participate, not just passively watch the action unfold. To create the app, editors at Sesame Workshop worked with programmers and designers at Callaway Digital Arts to update the book for the new digital format while still maintaining the educational themes of the book.

The interactivity of the app pulls young readers in by asking them to help the characters in the book. It’s the reader who makes comparisons between the wanted poster and Cookie Monster. To encourage this participation, it was important for children to relate to the characters acting as models for action in the story. Editors decided to make a child character already present in the book as gender-neutral as possible. In extra lines written for the app, gender-specific “he” and “him” terms were replaced with “the kid.” Puppeteer Fran Brill was asked to provide the voice, since she’s proven adept at performing both male and female characters on Sesame Street. She was able to create a voice that kids could interpret as either a girl or a boy – whichever helped them engage more with the story.

Callaway’s designers and programmers pored over 100 books from the Sesame Street library before choosing The Great Cookie Thief to adapt as their most recent project. The story won their vote because of its Cookie Monster star (a favorite character among the programmers) and the potential for interaction suggested by the illustrations and dialogue. There was also the hope that the story’s humor and the vintage look would appeal to adults, helping to promote a shared family experience.

The original plan was to adapt just the storybook into a simple story app. But as designers worked with new technologies they couldn’t resist adding a virtual photo booth where parents and kids can create their own wanted posters by adding props, googly eyes, and mustaches to self-portraits and Muppet characters. Editors and artists added wry humor to additional dialog and animations. When a cowboy hunts for his glasses to examine the wanted poster, he first pulls out an array of odd props from his jacket, including a sly homage to Steve Jobs. These additions help with the flow of the story and reward readers for lingering longer on a page.

For Senior Editor Betsy Loredo, working on book apps has required a tectonic shift in her thought process as an editor. In The Monster at the End of This Book, Grover desperately tries to keep the reader from turning the pages of his story so they will not reach the end of the book. When the story was developed into an animated app, it was difficult to imagine how to adapt it digitally when the whole concept revolved around physically turning pages. By accepting the idea that terms like “book”, “page” and “turn” were metamorphosing into something different for kids growing up reading books digitally, the possibility for what a book might become seemed limitless.

Understanding the evolving media children are using to read and having a presence in that media means that Sesame Workshop will continue to use books to extend Sesame Street’s curricular goals, no matter how kids turn the pages.

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“It was very obvious that the things they were most interested in were various gadgets and computers,” she said. But she felt that there weren’t enough children’s books available digitally. Instead of waiting for them to come along, Hoh took the initiative and in 2010 founded MeeGenius, of which she now serves as CEO.

Two years later, MeeGenius and Sesame Workshop are happy to announce that we’ve formed a partnership that will bring six Sesame Street e-book titles to web, iOS and Android platforms. Beginning today with Celebrate School: First Day, the new titles will debut every Wednesday throughout the month of September.

“Think of the app as a bookshelf, bookreader and bookstore all rolled into one,” Hoh said. “The other thing is, it’s not just an app. We’re available on multiple platforms. The web. Google TV. Simply by downloading MeeGenius onto one of your platforms, you get all of those options.”

Each title features lively audio narration and text highlighting. An exclusive set of fun questions and activities at the end of each story extends the learning beyond the book and also helps build reading comprehension skills. Each e-book can be downloaded to the user’s MeeGenius library for $3.99-$4.99.

Hoh said that working with Sesame Workshop was a significant milestone for MeeGenius, but added that the partnership is also personally exciting, given how much her three girls love Sesame Street. “All six of these books are hardback books that we own on our bookshelf. I’ve read them to my kids hundreds of times.”

In addition to Celebrate School: First Day, the other books available on MeeGenius are Count to 10, Elmo and Abby’s Wacky Weather Day, Get Ready for School: Colors, It’s Check-up Time, and Elmo and The ABCs of Cookies.

As Hoh put it, Sesame Workshop is “really looking out for where kids are going next and making sure their beloved characters are there.” She’s absolutely right, and that is exactly why we team up with innovative, education-minded organizations like MeeGenius.

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Sesame Workshop Co-Founder Joan Ganz Cooney signs a contract with Random House in 1984.

In January 1970, less than two months after Sesame Street first aired, Joan Ganz Cooney, the co-founder of Sesame Workshop, received a letter.

“Our editorial staff in particular and many other of our associates have been watching the outstanding progress of your Sesame Street show with real respect and admiration,” read its opening line.

The letter, sent by the Western Publishing Company, was the beginning of Sesame Workshop’s relationship with books, the Workshop’s very first licensed product format. Eventually Western Publishing’s classic Little Golden Books line, which included beloved children’s books such as Sesame Street’s The Monster at the End of This Book (1971), How to Be a Grouch (1976), and The Together Book (1971), was published by Random House.  Today we are still using our imaginations to rethink those classic titles — The Monster at the End of This Book now comes in an interactive app form — and to create new titles that encourage our longstanding curricular goals, such as the Elmo’s Big Birthday Bash! book app.

This relationship wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of a small group of talented and enthusiastic individuals. In the early 1970s it was Random House editor Jason Epstein and Sesame Street songwriter Christopher Cerf who formed the backbone of this relationship. Today, Sesame Workshop’s Vice President of Publishing, Jennifer A. Perry, and Naomi Kleinberg, the editorial director of the Sesame Street publishing program at Random House, carry on the tradition Jason and Christopher started.

“There’s a lot of history,” said Naomi, who has been working with Sesame Street since 1992. “We have got some of the great classics in our library. There is something about these books that gives them timelessness. They have a heart that many books don’t. There’s this wonderful humor. There’s always this message about friendship, about sharing, about community. There’s a kindness at the heart of it.”

A page for the Elmo's Big Birthday Bash! book app.

Although classic series like the Little Golden Books still make up a large part of the work Sesame Workshop and Random House do together, we’re also at the forefront of some of Random House’s newest projects. For instance, Elmo’s Big Birthday Bash! is the first app in Random House’s longstanding print series, “Step into Reading.”

“Out of all the premier children’s brands Random House works with, we are really honored that Random House selected Sesame Street to launch its Step into Reading series into the digital arena,“ said Jennifer.  “It’s also the first original story Sesame Street has created for a book app, and we hope to publish the title in print, showing that inspiration between the print and digital worlds works in both directions.”

When I sat down with Jennifer in her office to discuss Sesame Workshop’s relationship with Random House, the letter from the Western Publishing Company Joan Ganz Cooney received in 1970 was sitting in her in-box. When I asked her about it, she said she keeps the original copy on her desk. “It reminds me in a very concrete way of the legacy I am entrusted with for a short time,” she said. “Everyone who works in the Sesame Publishing Group is proud to be a part of such a longstanding tradition.”

We can’t all have the original copy of that letter on our desks, but I know she’s not the only one at Sesame Workshop who feels that way.

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