Pegor PAPAZIAN: “Our super goal is to invent the future of learning”
07.07.2022 (Caucasian Journal) Our guest is Pegor PAPAZIAN, Chief Development Officer, TUMO Center for Creative Technologies (Armenia). TUMO is an international network of schools for teenagers (12–18 years) that offer free education in IT, technology, and design, founded in 2011 in Yerevan. While major part of centers are located in Armenia, TUMO has opened its schools in many countries.
The TUMO’s menu of courses sounds tempting for nearly every world’s teenager: Animation, Game Development, Filmmaking, Web Development, Music, Writing, Drawing, Graphic Design, 3D Modeling, Programming, Robotics, Motion Graphics, Photography, New Media… Is it all available for free? Which countries are lucky to have TUMO centers already, and which are on the waiting list?
Alexander KAFFKA, editor-in-chief of Caucasian Journal: Dear Pegor, welcome to Caucasian Journal! You are one of the founders and leaders of TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, which is now becoming a truly global educational project originating from Armenia. For Caucasian Journal, TUMO is a “must cover”, because it’s symbolizing all our priorities in one bottle: It’s innovative, it’s about free access to education, it’s created in the South Caucasus, and it spreads internationally raising the global awareness of this region. Though our readers already know about TUMO from the recent interview with Rev Labaredian, it won’t hurt to talk once again about the basics of your project. What was at the root of TUMO, and how did you get involved in it? How did it all happen?
Pegor PAPAZIAN: TUMO is a program initially developed by our founding benefactors Sam and Sylva Simonian, my wife Marie Lou and myself. Marie Lou and I had just moved to Armenia with our five children who went into the local education systems at various grade levels, and the TUMO program was conceived as a complement to that education system, largely inherited from the Soviet Union, that was missing, at the time, many important pedagogical foundations. The education system was too focused on identifying and developing a small intellectual elite, often chosen arbitrarily, at the expense of the huge potential of the majority of school children. Over time, we realized that what we had created essentially as an “antidote” to that ineffective system of education was actually in high demand not just in Armenia, but across the world.
