After having a fun and relaxing free day, we started day eleven off by visiting Tumo. Tumo is an after school program which specializes in activities such as engineering, programming, music recording etc. TUMO is actually an abbreviation of Hovhannes Tumanyan, because the first TUMO that was built in Yerevan was next to his garden.
After arriving at TUMO we met with Ani who showed us the study rooms and explained to us that there are TUMO’s all over Armenia with over 8,000 students in total. We learned that there are TUMO schools in Yerevan, Dilijan, Gyumri and Stepanagerd. The biggest school is the one in Yerevan, which was the one we went to.
After touring the main floor we split up into four groups to learn about one of four programs. The four activities were programming, film making, game development and robotics. We all learned the basics about those and even created parts of those programs. After creating and learning about those activities our parents came and toured the school while we ate lunch. We then finished our lunch and got souvenir TUMO necklaces and pins.
After spending the morning at TUMO we went to Dasaran. Dasaran is Armenian for classroom. During our arrival the fourth graders from “Vartanants Aspedneroo 106 Tbrots” presented dances, songs and welcoming sayings. Together we learned about science and did some experiments with them.
Then we went into the lobby of the school and the teachers and principal gave us candy and souvenirs. We each made a question for the apposing school to answer with a two minute film. Each school has one month to make the film, answer the question and send it to Dasaran School for all of their 450,000 students to watch.
The school gave us a username and password for their school website. The teachers also took individual pictures of all us for our profile picture. During the photography both schools signed a shirt to put up in the Dasaran School in Yerevan.
With our new friends we went to the Tankaran across our hotel. We saw paintings from the artists Ayvasovaski and Sureniance. The paintings were so beautiful and each were unique in their own way; from the pastel paintings to even self portraits made out of rocks. Our new friends left and we headed off to the hotel to get ready for dinner.
For dinner we went to a mouth watering pizza place called Pizza Toria.
Today has been one of my favorite days of this trip so far. If today was this good I can’t wait to see what the future holds for the rest of our time in our georgous motherland, Armenia.
– Alique Stepanian