Experience AI Comes to Uzbekistan — UNICEF's Tinkering with Tech and AI Expands National STEM Labs

Tinkering with Tech launched in 2024 as a UNICEF Global Learning and Innovation Hub initiative with Arm and Finland's Ministry for Foreign Affairs, piloted in Honduras, the Maldives, Montenegro and Viet Nam to build children's coding, computational-thinking and problem-solving skills. At a partnership workshop in Helsinki on 28–29 January 2026, UNICEF and Arm, together with the Micro:bit Educational Foundation and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, announced "Tinkering with Tech and AI," expanding the programme to Lao PDR, Ukraine and Uzbekistan with the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Experience AI curriculum specifically added to build AI literacy.

In Uzbekistan, under the government's Ishonch 2030 education project, UNICEF and the Ministry of Preschool and School Education have already equipped Innovative STEM Labs in 50 schools nationwide with smartboards, laptops, 3D printers, Arduino kits and micro:bits; Tinkering with Tech, and now Experience AI, is being rolled out across these labs, with UNICEF and the Ministry's stated long-term goal of embedding the programme in the national curriculum. The national civil-society organisation Tech4Impact supports local delivery.

As of the sources reviewed, published material describes programme design, infrastructure investment and a single trainer's qualitative reflection ("I have changed my mind about AI and now I have a better understanding of it") rather than measured student learning outcomes. The Raspberry Pi Foundation's own account is candid about the challenge ahead: some Uzbekistani classrooms have laptops and interactive whiteboards, while others operate with limited electricity, lower digital literacy and devices shared among many students — an acknowledged, unresolved gap rather than a solved problem.

Read the full analysis: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-localisation-matters-for-ai-literacy-lessons-from-uzbekistan/