Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, remains the country’s commercial and cultural center. It is where many of the nation’s business leaders, entrepreneurs, and internationally oriented families reside. With a strong private-school sector and a robust culture of sending students to U.S. boarding schools and summer programs, it was a natural setting for World EduFest this past April.
So what was NuVuX doing at an international education conference in Almaty, Kazakhstan?
For international educational consultant and NuVu parent Anya Turovskiy, the opportunity to elevate NuVuX — along with its sister organizations, NuVu High School and NuVu Summer — aligned with both her professional and personal educational mission. So she reached out to NuVuX and invited them to join her.
Held in April 2026, World EduFest brought together families, consultants, schools, and universities from across the globe to discuss international education opportunities. But while many conversations centered around admissions strategies, grades, and test scores, Anya believed something deeper needed to enter the room: project-based learning.
For Anya, the mission is deeply personal. “I feel that it’s time to talk about project-based education,” she said.
A homeschool parent of five children, she never intended to send her kids to a traditional school at all. “I’m so anti-grades, anti-school,” she admitted.
Instead, she built a project-based environment at home long before formally entering the world of educational consulting. Her children learned through experimentation, making, reflection, and curiosity-driven exploration. Over time, that philosophy became central not only to her parenting, but also to her professional work designing educational pathways and helping families navigate complex educational systems around the world.
When Anya discovered NuVu’s design studio model, she recognized something rare: a school environment that aligned with the values she had spent years trying to create herself. “It just felt like it was the right fit for him,” she said.
That belief eventually evolved into advocacy.
Although she works independently as an educational strategist, Anya has become one of NuVu’s most passionate ambassadors. In regions where academic performance and standardized metrics often dominate educational culture, she sees a growing hunger for more human-centered approaches.
“There is a shift in what colleges are looking for,” she explained. “Just having a great SAT score and GPA is not going to get you into MIT.” That message resonated strongly at World EduFest, where many families were intensely focused on admissions to American universities but had limited exposure to project-based learning models.
That is where NuVuX entered the conversation, with help from Kate James, NuVuX’s Head of Product Experience.
NuVuX partners with schools and organizations around the world to help integrate design thinking, fabrication, interdisciplinary studios, and hands-on learning into existing educational environments. Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all curriculum, NuVuX works collaboratively with schools to build programs tailored to their students, educators, and communities.
For Kate, the work is about helping schools rethink what learning can look like when students are actively creating instead of passively consuming information.
An educator with backgrounds in visual studies, wearable art, and makerspace curriculum design, Kate has spent years helping schools develop project-based experiences. Through NuVuX partnerships, she works directly with teachers and students to create studios that foster creativity, experimentation, and problem-solving.
“We’re trying to optimize what they’re already doing through project-based extensions,” Kate explained while describing her work with NuVuX partner schools — creating a philosophy that can scale globally because it’s fundamentally adaptable.
At one school, NuVuX’s support may look like developing a middle school robotics program or fabrication lab. At another, it may take the form of interdisciplinary design studios integrated into existing curriculum. In Kazakhstan, Anya believes the opportunity was especially powerful because many families and educators are already searching for alternatives to rigid educational models — and are simply not sure where to look.
“I think people don’t know about it as much,” Anya said of project-based education and educator training. “And so I’m so committed to helping NuVuX reach a new audience.”
The trip to Almaty was not simply about promoting a school or summer program. It represented something larger: a growing international conversation about what meaningful education should actually prepare students to do.
And for Anya, that work feels urgent.
For a parent who once believed she would never trust a school with her children, finding a model she now wants to help bring to the world says perhaps more than any brochure or presentation ever could.
