Sesame Workshop Gets Games, Adds to Staff

Sesame Street: Elmo's A-to-Zoo Adventure allows kids to explore zoo habitats and play games based on a variety of literacy skills. Sesame Street: Cookie's Counting Carnival features Cookie Monster and Big Bird through gameplay involving math skills such as number identification, counting, shapes and pattern recognition. Both titles are now available for Wii, Nintendo DS and PC.

"Sesame Street: Elmo's A-to-Zoo Adventure and Sesame Street: Cookie's Counting Carnival are unlike other educational entertainment for preschoolers in how they combine console and handheld video games with Sesame Street's curriculum and the characters that families know and love,' says Samantha Ryan, senior vice president of development and production at Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. "The games are entertaining and intuitive,

Meanwhile, Sesame Workshop has named two new senior vice presidents.

Dr. Charlotte Frances Cole was named senior vice president of global education, where she will be responsible for companywide strategies, as well as the development of curriculum and research. Cole has worked with Sesame Workshop since 1994 as part of the education, research and outreach team. Most recently, she worked on projects with educators and production teams in Bangladesh, Colombia and the West Bank/Gaza. Before Sesame, Cole worked as a senior researcher at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston on a longitudinal study of families of children with acute and chronic illness funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Jeanette Betancourt has been promoted to senior vice president of outreach and educational practices, where she will continue to be responsible for the strategic positioning and delivery of domestic outreach initiatives to targeted audiences and communities most in need. She has been with Sesame Workshop since 1993.