Saudi Arabia · Live online · Ages 6 to 67
In most countries a school still has to be persuaded that AI belongs in the timetable. In the Kingdom that argument is over. AI is taught inside the ordinary school day from Grade 4 to more than six million students. So the real question for a family in Riyadh, Jeddah or Dammam is not whether their child should learn AI. It is what separates their child from every classmate learning the same thing: build hours, measured error, and a project at a link somebody else can open.
Teaching since 2020 · 10,000+ students across 25+ countries · no recordings sold as classes
In short
Modern Age Coders runs live online AI and machine learning classes for students in Saudi Arabia, ages 6 to 67, in batches of five to eight or one to one. The national AI curriculum already gives every school child the vocabulary, so our work starts a level below it: Python, the mathematics under machine learning, and models the student trains, measures and publishes. Classes run Sunday to Thursday on Arabia Standard Time. Fees start at USD 40 a month, SAR 150 at the peg, and the first class is free.
The catalogue
Placement follows current ability, not year of birth. Each of the three bands is its own curriculum, with its own build work and its own end point. Every card leads to the complete syllabus with dates and fees.
SA / KIDS / 01
Children write real Python from the first month: turtle graphics, small games, then the step where a program stops following instructions and starts learning a rule from examples. Deeper than the school introduction, and in the same language.
Open the syllabusSA / KIDS / 02
Where an answer comes from, why a model can be fluent and wrong at the same time, and how to check a claim before repeating it. Children practise catching a confident mistake, which is the habit that keeps its value longest at this age.
Open the syllabusSA / KIDS / 03
Children instruct an AI tool to build something, then read what came back and repair the broken part. Issuing the instruction takes an afternoon to learn. Judging the output is the half we spend the term on.
Open the syllabusSA / TEEN / 01
The spine of this page. A year long route through Python, the mathematics the subject actually requires, classical algorithms, neural networks, computer vision and language models, with a trained and evaluated model closing every stage.
Open the syllabusSA / TEEN / 02
Most of the real work sits before the model. Loading, cleaning, joining and plotting, finding the row that would have poisoned the result, then a first honest set of predictions on Saudi open data.
Open the syllabusSA / TEEN / 03
Two years from a first line of code to genuinely advanced Python. The recommended entry point for a teenager aiming at KFUPM, where every undergraduate meets Python in the first core course whatever their major.
Open the syllabusSA / TEEN / 04
Shipping real web and Python projects with AI assistance, while learning to review what the assistant wrote line by line. Teens finish able to deliver something, and able to defend every part of what they delivered.
Open the syllabusSA / PRO / 01
The full engineering route. Supervised and unsupervised learning, deep networks, training discipline, evaluation that survives a hostile reviewer, and the deployment step most courses skip.
Open the syllabusSA / PRO / 02
How a large language model is trained, fine tuned and grounded against documents you own, and how an agent is constrained so it does not fail quietly. Directly relevant to the sovereign Arabic model work now running inside the Kingdom.
Open the syllabusSA / PRO / 03
For professionals in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam and Dhahran who want the applied half first: machine learning and language processing pointed at the reports, spreadsheets and pipelines already sitting on their desk.
Open the syllabusSA / PRO / 04
The job shaped route. Statistics, SQL, feature engineering, modelling, and explaining a result to somebody who will not read your notebook. Ends with a portfolio written for a hiring manager rather than a marker.
Open the syllabusSA / PRO / 05
The interview gate on every serious engineering role, and the reason a pipeline that works on a thousand rows still works on ten million. Taught as problem solving under time pressure, not as memorisation.
Open the syllabusSA / ALL / 06
Beyond AI we teach mathematics from early number sense to university level, web development, app development, game development and exam preparation, all live and all timed to the Sunday to Thursday week.
Open all coursesWhat you actually build
Every market we teach in gets a first project built on that country's own data, because a model your family can argue with is a model you remember. In Saudi Arabia that is the Hajj register. GASTAT publishes the pilgrim count each year from Ministry of Interior administrative records, so it is a register rather than a survey estimate. The published timeline runs from 1970 to 2025 and the 1447 AH bulletin adds 2026, giving 58 real annual observations.
| Year | Hijri | Total pilgrims | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1970 | 1390 | 1,079,760 | First year of the published series |
| 1983 | 1403 | 2,501,706 | |
| 1988 | 1408 | 1,379,556 | Pre-pandemic series low |
| 1992 | 1412 | 2,114,217 | |
| 2000 | 1420 | 1,839,154 | |
| 2010 | 1431 | 2,789,399 | |
| 2012 | 1433 | 3,161,573 | All time high |
| 2013 | 1434 | 1,980,249 | Country quotas cut 20% for the Mataf expansion |
| 2016 | 1437 | 1,862,909 | Final year of the cut |
| 2017 | 1438 | 2,352,122 | Quota cut revoked |
| 2019 | 1440 | 2,489,406 | Last pre-pandemic year |
| 2020 | 1441 | 1,000 | Pandemic. Disputed: sources give 1,000 or about 10,000 |
| 2021 | 1442 | 58,745 | Residents inside the Kingdom only |
| 2022 | 1443 | 926,062 | Partial reopening |
| 2023 | 1444 | 1,845,045 | |
| 2024 | 1445 | 1,833,164 | |
| 2025 | 1446 | 1,673,230 | External 1,506,576, domestic 166,654 |
| 2026 | 1447 | 1,707,301 | External 1,546,655, domestic 160,646 |
The framing matters as much as the data. This is not a demand forecast. It is capacity and logistics planning, which is the question the Kingdom actually asks of these figures through the Pilgrim Experience Program, the Makkah Route Initiative and Nusuk: how many people are we building for. The framing is what decides which errors are expensive.
The features: year, Hijri year, the previous total and the total three years back, a quota_cut flag for 1434 to 1437 AH, a disruption flag for 2020 to 2022, the Gregorian month of Arafat derived by converting Dhul Hijjah 9, the days since the previous Hajj, and Saudi population that year from GASTAT, 35.3 million at the end of 2024.
Two columns are deliberately excluded. GASTAT publishes the external versus domestic split and the air, road and sea split only for recent years, so adding them would buy two years of detail at the cost of fifty five missing values. Knowing when not to add a feature is a lesson most courses never reach. Later projects come from the Saudi Open Data Portal, which held over 11,439 datasets from 289 organisations as of June 2025.
pandasscikit-learn matplotlibhijridate linear regressionHistGradientBoostingRegressor mean absolute errorpermutation importance
Fifty eight rows, entered from the GASTAT bulletins rather than downloaded. Three rows are keyed to straddling Gregorian years, because a Hijri year crosses two Gregorian ones, so the student chooses a key and writes the decision down. The 2020 row is marked disputed in the file itself. Then plot it: three regime breaks are visible to the naked eye before any model exists.
Using hijridate or hijri-converter, compute the Gregorian date of Dhul Hijjah 9 for every year, then derive the month of Arafat and the days since the previous Hajj, 354 or 355. The student produces two facts rather than being told them: Hajj moves about eleven days earlier each Gregorian year, and laps the seasons roughly every thirty three.
Predict that this year equals last year, then compute the mean absolute error of that rule across the series. That single number is now the bar. Every model built afterwards has to beat it or be thrown away, and plenty of models students are proud of do not.
A linear regression on year is wrong, and the residual plot shows exactly where: 2013 to 2016 and 2020 to 2022. Add the quota_cut and disruption dummy variables, refit, and watch the error collapse. A dummy variable is how you inform a model about a decision a government made. No amount of curve fitting will infer a policy from a curve.
Train on 1970 to 2022 and test on 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Training has to include 2020 to 2022, otherwise the disruption dummy is always zero and the model never learns a coefficient for it. Then explain out loud why shuffling before splitting leaks the future into the past on a time series.
Re-score 2013 to 2016 with quota_cut set to zero. The gap between those predictions and the recorded totals estimates how many pilgrim places were traded away to rebuild the Mataf, a project that took its capacity from about 50,000 to about 107,000 people per hour. The student then has to say plainly that this is a number produced by a model, not a measurement.
Replace the regression with HistGradientBoostingRegressor using the lag features, then run permutation importance. The month of Arafat should score near zero, because Hajj volume is set by per country quotas rather than by season. A hypothesis correctly rejected is a result, not a failure. Finish by forecasting 1449 AH, writing the number to a file and leaving it untouched until GASTAT publishes. A prediction you cannot edit afterwards is the only honest kind.
The distinction
We teach both, in that order, and we tell parents plainly which one holds its value. Prompting tracks a product, and products get rewritten. Modelling rests on mathematics and mathematics does not.
This distinction lands harder in Saudi Arabia than almost anywhere, precisely because the state has already taught everyone to use AI. More than 1.1 million citizens have been certified through SAMAI, and six million school students meet AI in the ordinary timetable. That is a floor, and a floor is not a differentiator. The national strategy below rests on a sovereign Arabic language model, a national research centre and a regulator issuing binding guidance, and a generation trained only to prompt cannot staff any of it.
Why now, in Saudi Arabia
The National Strategy for Data and AI was published in October 2020 and is owned by SDAIA, the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, which was established by royal order in August 2019. Its headline targets for 2030 are specific enough to be checked: rank among the world's top 15 countries in AI, and train or host more than 20,000 data and AI specialists. The priority sectors named in the strategy are healthcare, energy, smart cities, logistics and financial services. Implementation was split into a capability building phase from 2020 to 2025 and a specialisation and commercialisation phase from 2025 to 2030, which means the Kingdom is now inside the second half.
On 10 March 2026 the Saudi Cabinet, chaired by Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, approved the designation of 2026 as the Year of Artificial Intelligence, and SDAIA, under its president Dr Abdullah Alghamdi, issued the official guidelines and logo. SAMAI, the One Million Saudis in AI programme, launched at the Global AI Summit in Riyadh in September 2024, passed 424,000 enrolments in its first year and reached its full target in November 2025, having trained and certified more than 1.1 million citizens, 52 per cent of them female. SAMAI 2, aimed at the government workforce, followed with eleven partner ministries.
Read that as a parent and the shape of the opportunity changes. In most countries the bottleneck is awareness. Here awareness has been solved at national scale and the remaining bottleneck is depth. A million certificates is a million people who can hold a conversation about AI. It is not a million people who can open a dataset, notice that the split was done wrong, and fix it.
The building work points the same way. SDAIA's National Center for Artificial Intelligence produced ALLaM, the sovereign Arabic large language model, using more than 400 specialists and over 500 billion Arabic text units; it took the top spot on the Arabic MMLU benchmark and is served on IBM watsonx and the Azure AI model catalog. Arabic natural language processing is a scarce and genuinely local skill. Meanwhile AWS launched its Riyadh region in January 2026 with three availability zones, and Google Cloud runs a Dammam region with Aramco, so cloud machine learning work now runs inside the country.
The regulation points there too. The Personal Data Protection Law has been in force since 2023 with SDAIA as regulator, and SDAIA has issued ten regulatory documents on data and AI, including AI Ethics Principles and Generative AI guidelines built around transparency, accountability, privacy, human oversight and risk management. Human oversight of a system you cannot inspect is a signature, not oversight.
A child who is twelve today turns twenty two in 2036 and will be applying into exactly the institutions this strategy is now building, against a cohort that all sat the same school AI curriculum. That is the whole reason this page exists, and the reason we will not sell a prompt engineering course as an AI education.
Top 15
Target global AI ranking by 2030 under the National Strategy for Data and AI
1.1 million
Saudi citizens trained and certified through SAMAI, target reached November 2025
6 million+
School students meeting AI inside the ordinary timetable from 2025-26
1st globally
Saudi Arabia's position in the ITU 2025 ICT Development Index
What gets hired, on the evidence of who is building: Python, Arabic natural language processing, cloud machine learning now that the regions are in-country, fraud and anti money laundering modelling, and industrial and energy machine learning. PythonArabic NLP cloud ML in-countryfraud and AML modelling industrial and energy ML
School and university
This is the single biggest fact about school in Saudi Arabia right now. From the 2025-26 academic year, AI is taught inside the ordinary public school day, developed jointly by the National Curriculum Center, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and SDAIA. It reaches more than six million general education students, begins in elementary school from Grade 4 and continues through intermediate and secondary. It sits under the Vision 2030 Human Capability Development Program and is matched at university level by the Saudi Academic Framework for AI Qualifications. Teachers across a system of roughly 32,000 schools are being trained to use AI tools in lesson design.
We take that as the starting line rather than the finish. A school course introduces concepts to a full class on a fixed timetable. What it cannot do at that scale is sit with one child while they debug a data loading error at nine in the evening, or push them to state their model's error in units a parent could check.
CBSE is the largest expatriate school system in the Kingdom by student numbers, followed by Cambridge IGCSE and A Level, the IB Diploma and the American high school diploma. The established CBSE names include International Indian School Jeddah, founded in 1969 as the Embassy of India School, International Indian School Riyadh, founded on 9 October 1982 with twenty students and running separate buildings for boys and girls since 1995, and International Indian School Dammam, among others. Beyond the Indian system, American International School Riyadh and Reigate Grammar School Riyadh serve the American and British curricula. Saudi nationals sit the General Secondary Certificate, the Shahadat Al-Thanawiyya Al-Amma, and the Ministry of Education returned to a two-semester year from 1447 AH after several years of a three-term calendar.
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran runs the most aggressive undergraduate AI mandate in the Gulf. Under AI+X, every undergraduate takes AI coursework regardless of major, built on four core courses: Introduction to Programming in Python and C, Introduction to Data Science, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and Business and Entrepreneurship. The stated target is to graduate 10,000 AI-skilled professionals by 2030. KFUPM was the first Saudi university to launch ChatGPT Edu with OpenAI, and at graduate level it runs a Master of Artificial Intelligence alongside a joint SDAIA and KFUPM MSc AI scholarship initiative.
The implication for a fifteen year old is obvious. A teenager who wants KFUPM should arrive already fluent in Python, because that first core course assumes nothing but rewards everything. Filling that gap is exactly why our Python for Teens track exists as a separate ladder rather than a footnote to the AI course.
King Saud University in Riyadh runs an MSc in Artificial Intelligence, asking for IELTS 4.5 or equivalent and a GAT quantitative section of at least 70, or a GRE quantitative score of at least 140. KAUST in Thuwal is graduate only: TOEFL iBT 81 or IELTS 6.5, the GRE encouraged but not required, and three letters of recommendation from professors or research advisers. Entry for 2026 is closed and applications for 2027 open in mid-August. KAUST Academy separately runs an AI Specialization programme for university students. Alfaisal University, Prince Sultan University, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University and Effat University all offer named AI or data science degrees.
Both are run by ETEC through the National Center for Assessment. Qudurat, the General Aptitude Test, pairs a verbal section with a quantitative one covering arithmetic, algebra, geometry and statistics; it is available in Arabic and English and can be retaken across grades 11 and 12. Tahsili is a curriculum achievement test sat at the end of Grade 12. Together with high school GPA those two typically carry 30 to 40 per cent of the admission decision. The quantitative half of Qudurat is the same mathematics we teach inside the machine learning, which is why our teens track never separates the two.
How the classes run
Saudi Arabia observes Arabia Standard Time, UTC+3, with no daylight saving and a single time zone across the whole Kingdom. India is UTC+5:30, so Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam and Madinah run 2 hours and 30 minutes behind our teaching base. Two local facts shape the rest. The weekend is Friday and Saturday, not Saturday and Sunday, so a batch pitched at the weekend without checking is half wrong here. And the school day starts brutally early: around 06:45 in winter, and in summer assembly at 06:15 with the first period at 06:30. Children are home in the early afternoon, but they woke around 05:15.
16:30 AST
Equivalent to 19:00 in India, Sunday to Thursday. Ages 6 to 12. After school, after a rest, and finished before Maghrib and the family meal. We do not move this age group later, because they are up again before 05:30.
19:30 AST
Equivalent to 22:00 in India, Sunday to Thursday. Teenagers, university students and working adults. The standard post-Maghrib study slot in the Gulf, and the busiest block we run for the Kingdom.
Saturday 10:00 AST
Equivalent to 12:30 in India. The weekend intensive, deliberately on Saturday and not Sunday, because Sunday is a school day here. Friday mornings and early afternoons stay clear for Jumu'ah.
Ninety minutes of live teaching from someone who picks up exactly where your child stopped. Screens are shared in both directions, so the teacher watches the student type and interrupts at the moment the mistake happens rather than marking it three days later. Batches are five to eight students, or one to one.
Between sessions a student gets a task, not a worksheet: something to build, break and bring back. Questions during the week go to the same teacher, not into a support queue. Nothing here is pre-recorded and nothing is auto-graded.
The 1448 AH year runs on two semesters. Semester 1 begins on Sunday 23 August 2026, the mid-year break runs from 8 to 16 January 2027, and the Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr break falls from about 26 February to 13 March 2027, the longest interruption in the calendar. There is a further break in May 2027 for Eid al-Adha, and the academic year ends on 17 June 2027.
Admission is continuous, so there is no closed intake to wait for. During Ramadan we move the children's slot to about 21:30 after iftar and pause the Saturday intensive. Because Islamic dates shift roughly eleven days earlier each Gregorian year, we rebuild the timetable every year rather than reusing last year's.
Student work
Not one of these is a mockup, or a screenshot of one. Every one is a working application at a real address, built by a student and left online where anyone can open it, including an admissions reader. Explore more in Student Labs.
AI and ML
A nutrition assistant that reads what you eat and coaches you towards a target, built end to end by a student.
AI and ML
A tutoring chatbot that answers maths and programming questions, written and deployed by a student.
AI and ML
An assistant that helps a young person spot unsafe situations online, designed and shipped by a student.
Data and forecasting
A working forecast application that pulls live data and renders it, built and published by a student.
Fees
Fees are quoted monthly in US dollars. The riyal figures beside them are reference conversions at the official peg of SAR 3.75 to the dollar, which has held since June 1986 and is defended by the Saudi Central Bank. The practical effect is that this price does not drift: SAR 150 today is SAR 150 next term. There is no admission fee and no annual lock in.
Free first class
USD 0
SAR 0, no card needed
Group batch
USD 40
SAR 150 a month at the peg
One to one
USD 100
SAR 375 a month at the peg
What families say
These are real reviews left by real families. We do not write testimonials and we do not commission them.
★★★★★
"The one step solution for my son. Modern Age Coders make learning coding so simple that kids love it. The teachers explain complex concepts clearly with practical exercises and interactive content."
Ria Mukherjee
Parent
★★★★★
"Modern Age Coders has been a game-changer for me. I struggled to grasp IT concepts and coding before joining, but their classes transformed everything. I can now confidently write complex programs with ease."
Samriddha Mondal
Student
★★★★★
"One of the most wonderful education centres out there. Education is not limited to school syllabus but focuses on skill development."
Vansh Agarwal
Student
★★★★★
"My child Dhairya is really enjoying the Modern Age Coders classes. This is his first online class and he eagerly looks forward to it. I can already see his improvement, and the teachers are very cooperative."
Sonam Oswal
Parent of Dhairya
★★★★★
"Modern Age Coders have wonderful teachers who teach in a clear, easy and practical way. The teacher boosts students' confidence and inspires them to learn without hesitation."
Sonu Goyal
Parent
★★★★★
"Coding classes here make learning very interesting and conceptual. The teachers teach us in a very easy-to-understand and efficient way."
Arush Poddar
Student
Questions from the Kingdom
The national curriculum settles whether a child should learn AI, so nobody needs to sell you that. From the 2025-26 academic year AI is taught inside the ordinary school day, from Grade 4, to more than 6 million students. That is a floor, and every classmate in the country stands on it. What we add is build hours: your child prepares the data, writes the code, trains the model, states the error in units you can check, and publishes the result at a link. A portfolio is what separates two students who sat identical lessons.
Saudi Arabia keeps Arabia Standard Time, UTC+3, with no daylight saving and one time zone for the whole Kingdom. India is UTC+5:30, so Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam and Madinah are 2 hours and 30 minutes behind India. Children aged 6 to 12 take 16:30 AST, which is 19:00 in India: after school, after a rest, finished before Maghrib. We do not push that age later, because they are awake again before 05:30. Teens and adults take 19:30 AST. Both run Sunday to Thursday, because the weekend here is Friday and Saturday, and the weekend intensive is on Saturday rather than Sunday.
USD 40 for a group batch is SAR 150, and USD 100 for one to one teaching is SAR 375, converted at the official peg. The riyal has been fixed at SAR 3.75 to the US dollar since June 1986 and the Saudi Central Bank defends that rate with its reserves. So the price does not drift: SAR 150 this term is SAR 150 next term, which is not true of a rupee quote. We present the riyal figures as reference conversions at the peg, not as a displayed checkout price.
In two ways. Qudurat, run by ETEC through the National Center for Assessment, has a quantitative section covering arithmetic, algebra, geometry and statistics, and Tahsili is a curriculum achievement test sat at the end of Grade 12. With school GPA those two typically carry 30 to 40 per cent of an admission decision, so the mathematics we teach inside the machine learning is the mathematics they examine. KFUPM is the sharper case: AI+X puts every undergraduate through AI coursework whatever their major, and a student who arrives fluent in Python starts in front of it. KAUST is graduate only and wants three letters of recommendation from professors or research advisers. Published work is how you earn them.
Yes, and it is one reason we start children on Python rather than a drag and drop environment. CBSE is the largest expatriate school system in Saudi Arabia by student numbers, and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence papers are taught in Python, the same language your child would already be writing with us. Our teachers work with the CBSE syllabus every day in India, so a relocation is a change of address rather than of subject. Families on IGCSE, the IB Diploma or an American diploma follow the same ladder, and the portfolio moves either way because it lives at a public link.
We plan around them rather than through them. Saudi public schools returned to a two-semester year from 1447 AH, so anyone still quoting three terms is out of date. Semester 1 of the 1448 AH year begins on Sunday 23 August 2026, the mid-year break runs 8 to 16 January 2027, and the Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr break runs from roughly 26 February to 13 March 2027. During Ramadan schools move to about 09:00 to 13:00, so we shift the children's slot to around 21:30 after iftar and drop the Saturday intensive. Islamic dates move about 11 days earlier each year, so we reset the timetable annually.
The Personal Data Protection Law has been in force since 2023 with SDAIA as the regulator, and SDAIA has issued ten regulatory documents on data and AI, including AI Ethics Principles built around transparency, accountability, privacy, human oversight and risk management. What this page collects is small and visible on the form itself: a name, a phone number and an age band, used to arrange the free first class. Lessons are live video with a named teacher, not a system that scores or profiles a child. For the specifics of where records are stored, ask on the callback and we will answer in writing.
Tool choice follows age. Minimum ages on commercial AI products are set by the products themselves, several are 18 and up, and we publish what each one requires in our AI tools age guide and teach around it. Younger children work almost entirely in Python with pandas, matplotlib and scikit-learn, none of which carry an age gate, because at that stage the point is to build rather than to prompt. Arabic capability is a real local question: SDAIA's National Center for AI built ALLaM on more than 500 billion Arabic text units, it took the top place on the Arabic MMLU benchmark, and HUMAIN ships HUMAIN Chat on ALLaM 34B. Teaching is in English, and Arabic natural language processing is one of the scarcest skills in the Kingdom.
Start here
Leave a number and a mentor calls you back, usually within a few hours, at an hour that suits the Kingdom rather than one that suits us. The opening class is taught, not sold, and it settles which band your child belongs in before anything is paid.
Prefer to look around first? Read how we teach, browse the full course catalogue, check the AI tools age guide, or see what students have built in Student Labs.