SRI and Maka collaborate to help families find thoughtfully curated videos for young children
SRI’s AI-powered APPROVE supports Maka’s expert-led curation of video content for young children.
SRI has licensed its video analysis technology to Maka (makakids.com), a technology startup developing a curated video streaming app for children from birth through age 6. SRI’s technology, called APPROVE (Assisting Parents to Review Online Videos for Education), uses AI to identify early literacy and math content in videos. APPROVE will help Maka’s experts review and curate video content appropriate for children’s developmental stages.
APPROVE emerged over a 7-year collaboration between SRI education researchers and computer scientists, funded by the SRI Education Innovation Laboratory and the National Science Foundation. APPROVE can identify videos with early mathematics and literacy content with 90% accuracy compared to trained human video coders. It can make fine-grained content classifications, detecting video content aligned to specific national mathematics and literacy learning standards.
At Maka, APPROVE is the first pass in a two-step review. The AI screens large libraries of licensed and independent programming and surfaces episodes with early learning content. Maka’s experts then evaluate every episode through Imprint, Maka’s framework, which maps developmental domains and milestones. Imprint was developed in collaboration with researchers at Yale Child Study Center.
I want every family to find videos that nurture their children’s development. As a parent of a young child, I know how hard that is, given all the kids’ media available today. I’m thrilled to see APPROVE help families find videos with potential to enrich children’s lives long after the screen is off.”
– Claire Christensen, SRI Education
The educational programs of my childhood shaped who I am today,” said Claire Christensen, senior education researcher at SRI and co-developer of APPROVE. “They were thoughtfully designed to teach children with care and respect. I want every family to find videos that nurture their children’s development. As a parent of a young child, I know how hard that is, given all the kids’ media available today. I’m thrilled to see APPROVE help families find videos with potential to enrich children’s lives long after the screen is off.”
“Parents have told us they’ve lost trust in kids’ media, and they’re right to,” said Isabel Sheinman, CEO and co-founder of Maka. “SRI’s technology lets our experts spend time where it matters most: choosing extraordinary stories and mapping them to the skills children need. Partnering with SRI on research means we can keep helping kids grow.”
The agreement comes at a time when online video viewing is becoming increasingly popular among young children (Mann et al., 2025). Parents want their children to watch educational videos, but finding those videos can be challenging. A 2020 report from the University of Michigan and Common Sense Media found that 75% of the online videos young children had watched had no or limited educational value (Radesky et al., 2020).
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