The TUMO Center for Creative Technologies has been awarded a top prize in the prestigious 2023-24 Tools Competition, one of the world’s major edtech awards, chosen from over 1,900 submissions for its groundbreaking AI solutions in education and honored in the competition’s highest category.
This prestigious competition is backed by leading and influential organizations such as OpenAI, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Ballmer Group.
The award will fund the development of TUMO’s AI Learning Coach, an innovative model designed to create hyper-personalized learning paths optimized for each student’s maximum learning outcomes. Trained on millions of hours of student data, the AI Learning Coach fine-tunes and adapts learning trajectories through reinforcement learning based on individual preferences, attributes, and history. The project team will experiment with various AI technologies and provide anonymized training data to researchers from Stanford AI Lab, Berkeley School of Education, and Carnegie Mellon University, supporting a range of complementary projects in AI and learning science.
“We’re adopting and developing AI solutions on multiple levels. We’re making our learning platform smarter, creating a generative AI curriculum as a new skill area, and integrating AI across all the tech and design disciplines we cover, from coding and game development to filmmaking and graphic design,” said Pegor Papazian, TUMO’s Chief Development Officer.
TUMO’s team for the competition included Vahakn Papazian, Director of Product Development; Tom Auger, Senior Software Engineer; Lilit Tovmasyan, Learning Science Specialist; and Pegor Papazian, Chief Development Officer.
TUMO has a history of providing machine learning and AI workshops to its students. Its broader engagement with generative AI began with a global symposium on AI and education that TUMO held last September, coinciding with the launch of the tumo.ai website. The symposium featured contributions from representatives of major technology companies such as Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, and Meta, researchers from institutions like MIT, Harvard, and USC, and thought leaders including Mitchel Resnick, Stephen Wolfram, and Daron Acemoglu.
This September, TUMO will present its approach to AI education at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris during Digital Learning Week.
“It’s essential to address ethics and safety when integrating powerful new technologies into the curriculum,” said Papazian, reflecting on a key symposium insight. He added, “However, a defensive approach to AI isn’t viable in underserved communities and in developing countries. We aim to equip young people with the deep technical insights that can empower them to participate in ecosystems of technology innovation.”
