UNESCO awards 2026 ICT in Education Prize to AI education projects in Finland and Brazil
On 9 September 2026, UNESCO awarded its 2026 ICT in Education Prize during Digital Learning Week in Paris to Finland's Generation AI and Brazil's Redação Paraná. Generation AI, developed by the University of Eastern Finland, the University of Helsinki, the University of Oulu and other partners, provides classroom activities and tools to help students understand and critically assess AI systems; its materials have been accessed more than 200,000 times across over 50 countries, and workshops and school interventions have involved 1,500 students and teachers. Redação Paraná, developed by the State Secretariat of Education of Paraná in Brazil, combines AI-assisted feedback with teacher involvement to support writing and revision, reaching approximately 850,000 students across 2,000 schools, with teachers trained to integrate its materials. The two projects were selected from more than 100 nominations, and the 2026 prize focused on approaches that use AI while encouraging learners to retain critical thinking, creativity and independent judgement.
The award offers two verifiable, scaled examples of AI in education: Finland focuses on teaching students to understand and critique AI systems, while Brazil combines AI-generated writing feedback with teacher mediation at scale in public education. For schools, teachers and AI education product teams, the coverage figures and implementation approaches can serve as references for curriculum design and product positioning. The limitation is that UNESCO published access counts, participant numbers and school coverage, not independent research results on learning outcomes or score improvements. The Finnish project demonstrates a path of using classroom activities and tools to develop students' critical assessment of AI systems, with materials accessed more than 200,000 times across over 50 countries. The Brazilian project demonstrates a large-scale model combining AI-assisted writing feedback with teacher involvement, covering about 2,000 schools and 850,000 students, with accompanying teacher training.