Green Skills Award 2023 finalist: Armenia - TUMO Labs

ClimateNet: How Armenian young people are playing their part in monitoring climate change.

A leading provider of free digital and technological education for youngsters in Armenia is launching a novel project to involve teenagers in tracking climate change.

The TUMO Centre for Creative Technologies, which offers a range of cutting-edge courses for students and young professionals that put young people in charge of their own learning, is creating a network of Internet of Things (IoT) weather stations to enable young professionals and teenagers to play their part in monitoring climate change.

The project is part of TUMO Labs - the educational hub of the EU TUMO Convegrence Center in Yerevan. At TUMO Labs participants have the opportunity to upskill, reskill and explore new STEM (science, technology, engineering, maths) topics to improve their career paths or go further in to research and development.

ClimateNet, part of the project-based learning component of TUMO Labs, aims to create 100 weather stations across a network of TUMO Boxes – solar-powered, repurposed shipping containers that offer free after school courses to thousands of teenagers across Armenia. It is a multi-faceted programme that will also offer a train-the-trainer programme and self-learning module for young professionals to support them to innovate and succeed in a globally-connected market in green skills.

The project, which will engage three batches of students for a 6-month commitment, ultimately aims to establish Armenia’s first network of real-time, hyper-localised weather stations.

The breadth and scope of the project have made it one of the 10 finalists in the European Training Foundation’s Green Skills Awards 2023.

Students, who commit to 12-15 hours per week during their stint, will learn about software and hardware development, data visualization and analysis, coding and manipulation of collected data. The training also involves leadership and facilitation components to enable graduates to go onto to train others as the number of TUMO Boxes expands across Armenia.

The aim, Bahareh Fatemi, Head of TUMO Labs and the EU TUMO Convergence Centre, says, is to “provide young people with the opportunity to delve deeper into climate change and weather forecasting, while simultaneously offering avenues for upskilling and reskilling in IoT and data analysis. The knowledge acquired through immersive hands-on projects holds boundless potential across diverse industries.

“The data they collect – on wind, air quality, rainfall, seismic activity and other indicators – will be used open-source by researchers, government agencies and farmers to better understand precisely how climate change is affecting Armenia, allowing for informed and evidence-based decisions based on the data.”

The collected data can also inform potential environmental dangers, such as flooding or earthquakes.

To ensure the longevity of the project – which has already developed 20 operational weather stations – TUMO Labs has developed a self-learning module on IoT and climate change. This will enable more than 1,000 young people to access the module each year.

ClimateNet could effectively create Armenia's first network of micro-weather stations, enabling the government, local authorities, farmers, and researchers to access real-time weather data to inform agricultural and policy decisions.

Although best known for its core digital focus -with courses ranging from game development and robotics to filmmaking and graphic design – TUMO is also involved in a wide range of environmental learning. ClimateNET projects will enable young adults to “learn more about IoT, climate change, and weather forecasting, while also becoming the trainers for passing the knowledge of supporting and maintaining the devices and collecting and visualizing local weather data to the teenagers in the boxes.” Students will also participate in surveys on climate change among young people, run by trainers and TUMO staff.

"Our vision is to have a wide network of these weather stations across the TUMO Boxes, Bahareh says. This will have a large-scale impact on raising awareness of climate change while equipping young people with solutions-oriented skills to understand the changes in real-time, while developing ideas on how to tackle environmental and climate challenges.”