Creative coding for everyone: How Pi Jam expands digital skills for underserved learners in India with AWS

India’s National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) calls for technology to play a central role in equitable, high-quality education, emphasizing “online and digital education: ensuring equitable use of technology.” Yet reliable connectivity and devices remain out of reach for many students, particularly in rural and government schools:

• Only 53.9 percent of schools in India have an internet connection, and 57.2 percent have computers, according to the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2023–24 report.
• At the household level, 67.6 percent of children live in homes with a smartphone, but 26.1 percent cannot access it, even when a phone is present, according to the Annual Status of Education Report.

These gaps limit opportunities for millions of learners to gain the creative computing and problem-solving skills envisioned by NEP 2020. This is where Pi Jam Foundation—a nonprofit that is dedicated to bringing creative computing and digital skills to underserved students using Amazon Web Services (AWS)—steps in to close the digital divide.

Pi Jam Foundation and Code Mitra: Cloud-native from day one

Pi Jam Foundation created Code Mitra, an open-access modular platform that brings creative computing to marginalized learners and teachers across India. The platform uses block-based programming to help students develop 21st-century skills such as logic, problem-solving, and collaboration.

Drawing on local culture and real-world contexts, Code Mitra projects range from modeling water-conservation strategies in Kashmir to improving traffic flow in Maharashtra.

The platform integrates with national learning management systems (LMSs) such as India’s DIKSHA platform. Built for low-resource environments, the platform runs on low-cost Android phones and supports offline use so students can continue learning even when internet service is unreliable. Teachers gain built-in professional development tools and can co-create local content.

From the outset, Pi Jam built Code Mitra entirely on AWS to ensure reliability and scale in low-resource environments. Its architecture uses AWS Lambda, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon ElastiCache, and other managed services.

Pi Jam also uses Amazon Bedrock to power idea evaluation for large-scale student hackathons and to support custom artificial intelligence (AI) extensions for Scratch coding, enabling students to experiment with AI concepts while creative coding in a visual, block-based environment.

Impact on a national scale

Since launch, Code Mitra has reached 1.14 million learners across 95 percent of India’s districts, demonstrating deep penetration into rural and government schools. The platform supports a predominantly mobile audience, with 76 percent of learners accessing lessons on low-end devices, and its contextual activities achieve a completion rate of 58 percent, with 30 percent of learners submitting original ideas. Teacher capacity-building is equally significant: More than 11,000 educators across 14 districts have been trained, with 71 percent reporting that activities are easy to contextualize and 84 percent observing greater classroom engagement.

On the technology side, Pi Jam reports a 30 percent improvement in API response times after modernizing its platform infrastructure with AWS managed services, enabling smoother experiences for students even in low-bandwidth environments. These results underscore how a cloud-native platform can deliver creative computing experiences at scale, even in regions with limited connectivity.

Education Equity Initiative support

The AWS Education Equity Initiative (EEI) provided promotional credits that allowed Pi Jam to scale quickly in underserved geographies. EEI support helped facilitate the launch of India’s largest student hackathon, the Eco Creativity and Innovation Hackathon, with more than 700,000 participants and 200,000 idea submissions, and funded development of state-level learning portals such as a dedicated Code Mitra platform for the state of Telangana in southern India. This Telangana instance enables government-school students and teachers across the state to access structured creative coding pathways and locally relevant resources, demonstrating how EEI investment translates into sustainable, region-wide impact.

Future plans

Pi Jam aims to reach an additional 1 million learners by March 2026 and 7 million learners by March 2028, focusing on rural and government schools. Planned features include AI-powered personalized learning pathways and content-recommendation systems.

Conclusion

Pi Jam Foundation demonstrates how a cloud-native approach on AWS can expand creative computing to students who might otherwise be left behind. With continued backing from the AWS Education Equity Initiative, the organization is preparing to scale to millions more learners and introduce AI-driven personalization, helping every child, regardless of connectivity or device, gain the skills to thrive in a digital future.

To explore how your education program can use the cloud to expand access and transform learning outcomes, visit the AWS Education page.