TUMO Awarded WISE Prize for Education for its AI Solution

On November 25, at the WISE 12 Summit in Doha, Qatar, the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies was awarded first place in the WISE Prize for Education for its new AI learning program. The prize recognized the center’s GenAI focus area and “AI colearner” platform, which offers advanced AI skills to teens, free of charge, across the world.

The one million dollar WISE Prize, one of the leading global awards in the field of education, is organized by the World Innovation Summit for Education. For the 2024–2025 edition, WISE received 427 applications from around the world. A committee of international experts identified six finalists whose solutions address urgent education challenges, including the implications of artificial intelligence for teaching and learning. At this year’s WISE Summit, TUMO’s AI solution was selected from among these finalists as the winning solution.

Previous WISE laureates have included Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America and CEO of Teach For All, and Safeena Husain, founder of Educate Girls, a non-profit organisation focused on mobilising communities for girls’ education in India’s rural areas.

“One of the key challenges the WISE Prize aims to address is the implications of the emergence of AI in education. TUMO’s solution approaches the use of AI both as a learning objective and as a means to help students achieve that goal,” said Aurélio Amaral, Director of Programs, WISE. “This speaks to the core of our mission of supporting innovation that can enhance pedagogical practices from within.”

TUMO’s AI program is built around an innovative platform where AI agents appear not as tutors but as peers learning alongside the student. Students learn by teaching: when a student masters a concept, the AI colearner deliberately fails and asks for help. Teaching a peer reinforces the student’s newly acquired knowledge. Students learn by observing: when they don’t know where to begin, the AI goes first, and the student can emulate and get unstuck. The AI colearner adapts instantly to each student’s pace and context, providing real-time conversational feedback as a peer.

Building on this platform, TUMO has developed a new GenAI focus area centered on creative use of multimodal generative AI technologies where teens experiment with generative AI not as passive consumers, but as active users. They exercise creative agency and give shape to their ideas. GenAI joins TUMO’s list of focus areas at the intersection of technology and design, with AI components increasingly integrated across areas such as animation, game development, programming, graphic design, writing, and more.

“The WISE Prize acknowledges that AI in education can be human-centered, rigorous and inclusive,” said Marie Lou Papazian, CEO of TUMO. “What started as an experiment in Armenia is now part of a much larger effort to ensure that teenagers globally can learn with AI, understand its limits and shape how it is used.”

TUMO’s program is a free, public, after school program that combines self learning activities, workshops and project based labs in technology and design. Teens create their own learning paths on the TUMO Path platform, building portfolios that reflect their interests and skills. With the AI curriculum now embedded into this model, TUMO aims to turn teens into superlearners and sophisticated AI users who can adapt to new tools, think critically about their impact and participate fully in innovation ecosystems.

Founded in Armenia in 2011, TUMO has grown into an international network of centers and TUMO Boxes serving 35,000 students each week. The WISE Prize recognition adds a new chapter to that growth, underlining the role of leading-edge technologies in TUMO’s mission to create life-changing learning experiences on a large scale.