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Sesame Street releases app that serves situation-specific games

Sesame Workshop, the producers behind Sesame Street, launched a new mobile application that provides users with one of more than 150 games to play based on the situation and location of a user.

The app, Family Play, will serve up a game based on where a user is and how many people want to play the game. To create the app, Sesame Workshop collaborated with Hide&Seek, a game design studio based in London and New York.

"Sesame Street wants to be everywhere that parents are." said Spencer Burke, mobile strategist at Appboy, New York. "They have already proven successful in print, television, and toys and mobile is the next frontier. Sesame Street has built a robust app portfolio, but they need to cover more occasions. Mobile is the perfect medium to reach parents when they are looking for ways to play."

Mr. Burke is not affiliated with Sesame Workshop. He commented based on his expertise on the subject.

Sesame Workshop did not meet press deadlines.

Personalized games
Family Play has a game for every scenario, whether at home, away from home or traveling. The games are tagged by character, curriculum, location and mood.

The games do not require screen time and instead encourage educational, real-life entertainment for children.

?Sock Skee Ball? lets users throw rolled up socks into circles made of belts. ?Bathesketball? is a game for the tub that involves washcloths and a bowl.

There is also ?SuperLetterMarket? that asks users to shop alphabetically and ?Sleepy Handshakes? that has users put on airplane sleep masks and try to shake hands.

Additionally, parents can access Sesame Street celebrity content, recipes, parenting tips, show information and more via the app.

Family Play attempts to leverage mobile in order to allow users to interact and play in real life while bringing families together.

The games also incorporate educational and developmental skills, such as letters, numbers, science, STEM, self-regulation and executive function skills, social emotional, problem solving and critical thinking, healthy habits, imagination and creativity.

The app is available for $0.99 in Apple?s App Store.

Children at play
Recently, a number of companies have been rolling out fun and educational apps that are geared towards younger children.

For example, Rosetta Stone released a game-focused mobile application to help children gain basic literacy skills and a foreign language (see story).

Oceanhouse Media and Random House have also been creating child-friendly app-books. The companies recently launched the eighth Cat in the Hat book app (see story).

Additionally, Play-Doh rolled out its first educational app to help teach children pre-reading skills in a fun way (see story).

"Kids aren?t just growing up in a mobile-first world, they?re growing up in a touch-first world," Mr. Burke said. "Children are introduced to tablets and phones at a very young age and the first interfaces they use are touch-based."

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York