TUMO Center for Creative Technologies — Free Extracurricular Tech & Design Education for Teens

Founded in 2011 in Yerevan by Armenian-American philanthropists Sam and Sylva Simonian through the Simonian Educational Foundation, TUMO is a free, extracurricular technology and design education programme for teenagers aged 12-18, built around self-paced digital learning, hands-on workshops and expert-led 'labs' across 14 disciplines including coding, robotics, game development, animation, filmmaking, music and graphic design.
The model combines an open-access digital learning platform with in-person mentoring rather than a fixed classroom curriculum, letting each student choose their own learning path. Armenia now hosts six TUMO centres, and the model has been licensed or replicated in centres across 15 countries, reaching roughly 35,000 students weekly (25,000 in Armenia and 10,000 abroad) and more than 60,000 alumni in total as of 2024-2025.
An independent impact evaluation by Dalberg International, published in July 2023, compared TUMO alumni with a matched comparison group and found 29% of TUMO alumni enrolled in technology or creative-discipline university degrees versus 8% of the comparison group, and 24% attended top Armenian universities in tech-engineering or creative fields versus 6% of the comparison group. TUMO's Yerevan flagship centre also won a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award, recognising both its architecture and educational model.
As a philanthropically-funded model reliant substantially on the Simonian Educational Foundation and local government/private partnerships in each expansion country, replication depends on securing comparable long-term funding and dedicated facilities, which has limited scale-up mostly to cities that can attract a sponsoring partner.

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