La Rioja draws 3,000 people to its AI and education conference: the challenge now is measuring what changes in the classroom

By Medios Provincia · October 16, 2026.

The Argentine province of La Rioja closed the Second Provincial and National Congress on Artificial Intelligence and Education on October 15. The event ran on October 13, 14 and 15. According to figures released by the organizers, more than 600 teachers attended in person and more than 2,500 virtual connections were logged through the Late Play platform.

The provincial government organizes the event through its Ministry of Education. The first two days, held at the Paseo Cultural Castro Barros, focused on teacher training, with keynote lectures, talks and presentations of classroom experiences. The third day was aimed at young people. More than 100 students in their final years of secondary school worked with teacher tutors, and young professionals from La Rioja served as mentors. Their teams used AI to build technology projects that address real problems in the community.

Belén Molina, coordinator of the Núcleo del Conocimiento, gave a positive assessment of the event. She said new training sessions are already being prepared for teachers and students in the province's interior, along with the 2027 edition. She also called for the environmental impact of AI to be part of the debate. Laura Penacca, an educational technology specialist and undersecretary of education for the municipality of Pilar, argued that these tools do not replace teaching. Instead, she said, they make teacher support even more important.

Our take: the most valuable takeaway is the approach, not the attendance figure. Putting teachers at the center, before buying tools for students, is the right order. Experience from school systems that brought in technology without first training teachers generally shows that equipment alone does not improve results. This program also covers critical thinking and ethical use, and it opens the door to discussing AI's environmental cost, a topic these forums often leave out.

That said, we should be honest about what the material does not say. The figures measure attendance and connections, not learning. A virtual connection is not the same as a completed hour of training, and there is no data on how many teachers will apply what they saw or with what results. A congress is a good first step, but it is not an education policy in itself. The 2027 edition would be more useful if it reported indicators: how many schools use AI, for what, and with what measurable effect.

The underlying argument fits our editorial line. In the short term, the transition is uneven, and regions with fewer resources risk falling behind. A province in Argentina's interior that invests in training its teachers, and uses virtual training to reach its own remote areas, is a good sign against that gap. In the long term, an AI tutor guided well by a teacher could offer personalized attention at a scale no school system has ever had. Whether that future reaches everyone, and not just a few, depends on initiatives like this one, as long as they move from holding events to producing evidence.