TUMO Center for Creative Technologies — free AI and GenAI skills education for teenagers

TUMO Center for Creative Technologies is a tuition-free, nonprofit after-school program for teenagers aged 12–18, founded in 2011 in Yerevan, Armenia by Sam and Sylva Simonian through the Simonian Educational Foundation. Students choose from 14 learning targets — including programming, robotics, filmmaking, game development and, since 2024, generative AI — through a three-layer model of self-directed digital activities, instructor-led workshops and project-based 'learning labs', with no entrance exams, tuition fees or grades.

TUMO has grown from a single Yerevan center to 6 centers plus 40+ mobile 'TUMO Box' hubs reaching rural Armenia, and more than 20 international centers across Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas — over 60,000 learners take part weekly, with more than 60,000 alumni to date. Its newest focus area, GenAI, is taught through the 'AI Colearner' platform, an AI-driven system that lets teenagers learn AI skills through conversational, project-based interaction with a virtual peer ('Colo').

In November 2025, TUMO won first place — and $500,000 of a $1 million prize pool — in the WISE Prize for Education at the WISE12 Summit in Doha, selected from 427 applications worldwide for its AI Colearner platform; the WISE Advisory Board rated its impact 'Exceptional' and its scalability 'High'. The available evidence, however, is participation scale and an external jury's qualitative assessment rather than a controlled study of learning outcomes, and TUMO's core model is aimed at out-of-school youth rather than classroom teachers.

Read the full analysis: https://tumo.org/

Read the full analysis: https://tumo.org/