Children Television Workshop

Sesame Street is celebrate its 40th anniversary, American educational children's television series and a pioneer of the contemporary educational television standard, combining both education and entertainment. Sesame Street is well known for its Muppets characters created by Jim Henson. It premiered on November 10, 1969, and is the longest running children's program on US television.
The show is produced in the United States by the non-profit organization Sesame Workshop, formerly known as the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), founded by Joan Ganz Cooney and Ralph Rogers.
Beginnings
Up until the late 1960s, the use of television as an educational tool in the US was "unproven" and "a revolutionary concept". In 1966, the Carnegie Institute hired Joan Ganz Cooney to study how the media could be used to help young children, especially those from low-income families, learn and prepare for school. Cooney proposed using television's "most engaging traits” including high production values, sophisticated writing, and quality film and animation, to reach the largest audience possible. Cooney suggested creating a program that would spread pro learning values to both viewers and nonviewers (including their parents) that would affect them for many years after they stopped watching it.
Educational goals
As author Malcolm Gladwell has stated, "Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them".[15] Sesame Street was the first children's show that structured each episode and made "small but critical adjustments" to each segment to capture children's attention long enough to teach them something.
Sesame Street uses a combination of animation, puppets, and live actors to stimulate young children's minds, improve their letter and word recognition, basic arithmetic, geometric forms, classification, simple problem solving, and socialization by showing children or people in their everyday lives. Since the show's inception, other instructional goals have been basic life skills, such as how to cross the street safely, proper hygiene, healthy eating habits, and social skills; in addition, real-world situations are taught, such as death, divorce, pregnancy and birth, adoption, and even all of the human emotions such as happiness, love, anger, and hatred. Also, recently, the Sesame Street Muppets discussed the late-2000s recession with their most recent prime-time special Families Stand Together: Feeling Secure in Tough Times.
Coordinating "the clever use of Muppets and animation" with educational curriculum required what the CTW researchers called "careful thought"and influenced the show's structure. For example, they had to decide how to distribute the letters of the alphabet throughout each 130-episode season.