The Joan Ganz Cooney Center (informally, the Cooney Center) is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan research and innovation group founded by Sesame Workshop to advance children's literacy skills and foster innovation in children's learning through digital media. Background The Joan Ganz Cooney Center was founded in 2007 to study the role of digital technologies in promoting childhood literacy, particularly among elementary school age children. Activities The Cooney Center focuses on research, new technologies, and catalyzing policy change. Its activities comprise three primary themes: Literacy by Ten: The Cooney Center co-authored Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West: Empowering Parents and Educators, a 2012 report that has been used by literacy researchers from Stanford University and others around the globe. It was the result of a partnership with the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, to develop analyses and an action plan to raise literacy rates in America. In 2013, the Cooney Center partnered with the National Center for Families Learning (formerly the National Center for Family Literacy) to form the Aprendiendo Juntos Council, which focuses on improving literacy rates among Spanish-speaking American children. Digital Play: The Cooney Center has released and contributed to a number of reports and surveys on the connection between games and learning. In 2009, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Cooney Center published Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Learning and Health, which was used in a 2011 testimony to the United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. In 2010, the center offered a prize to top innovators in the field of children's digital learning and in 2011, the Cooney Center organized the first annual National STEM Video Game Competition. More recently, in February 2014, the Cooney Center launched GamesandLearning.org, a news site reporting on the latest in the field of educational gaming. Learning Together: The Cooney Center is the convener of the Families and Media Research Consortium, which also includes as members AARP, Sesame Workshop, Northwestern University, Arizona State University, and Stanford University. As part of the Families and Media Project, the consortium released a series of reports, the first of which was released on January 24, 2014, by the Cooney Center. For Learning at Home: Families' Educational Media Use in America, the Cooney Center collected data from parents of young children encompassing a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds to assess