Learn Fresh and AWS are scaling NBA Math Hoops with AI and cloud technology

Learn Fresh, an international education nonprofit dedicated to enhancing students’ STEM and social emotional achievement through sports and entertainment, set out to make math feel a little different. Its NBA Math Hoops program teaches math and social skills to students ages 8 to 14 through the excitement and appeal of basketball.

With NBA Math Hoops, students form teams by drafting real NBA and WNBA players and strategically use their players’ game statistics to score points while solving math problems in a competitive, fast-paced, timed game environment. The program consists of a curriculum, board game, and mobile app, and has now reached nearly two million students on six continents.

Students who participate in the NBA Math Hoops program join a fantasy sports-like league in the classroom or via the mobile app. Both the mobile app and board game focus on the same skills — operational fluency, fractions and decimals, probabilities, and data and statistics.

By completing math problems in the game, students unlock positions on a simulated basketball court to take shots with their team. The game flows like basketball, played in two halves with a game clock, shot clock, and rules like steals, fouls, and free throws.

Playing the long game on math literacy

The NBA Math Hoops curriculum and board game travel anywhere, but the app powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) is what carries the program to scale. Unlocking that requires building it to meet students where they are.

Learn Fresh’s program data showed that 93 percent of educators report students find math more accessible, relevant, and engaging after playing NBA Math Hoops, and that participants demonstrate 29 percent gains in fluency with basic operations. Research also highlighted gains in students’ leadership, grit, and resilience, while a randomized controlled trial conducted by WestEd found that students gained four to five months of math learning after just 17 to 24 hours of program exposure.

With that kind of traction, the opportunity for Learn Fresh is to bring the program to more students in more places.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, UNESCO estimates nearly 90 percent of students ages 6 to 14 are not achieving minimum proficiency in numeracy. Learn Fresh has been building in Africa since the first pilot in 2023, and has already trained more than 100 educators across South Africa, Botswana, and Mozambique, creating a strong foundation for regional growth.

“Learn Fresh believes in the power of STEM education on a global scale. Through this partnership, we are able to deepen our collaboration with NBA Africa and build upon our foundational work in South Africa and across the continent,” said Calvin Sibert, Chief Mission Officer at Learn Fresh.

Building the tech to meet students where they are

Through the AWS Education Equity Initiative, a $100 million commitment of AI and cloud technology that empowers organizations to create digital learning solutions globally, AWS is helping Learn Fresh chart a technical path to reach 10,000 students across South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Egypt by the end of 2027. The technical work spans Learn Fresh’s NBA Math Hoops mobile app and the Learn Fresh Coaches Association platform it uses for educator training and program delivery.

Learn Fresh uses Amazon Bedrock, which offers a fully managed way to access a broad and expanding selection of foundation models from leading AI companies, to customize its existing user experience and, for example, calibrate the difficulty of math challenges in the mobile app based on students’ progress.

Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service, automatically translates static content into priority languages, helping educators and students across the region access new content and updates more quickly. As Learn Fresh adds new ways to understand how users engage with the program, Amazon Quick helps staff explore insights around games completed, participation over time, regional adoption, and learning trends through natural-language questions — and even share those insights through interactive dashboards.

Beyond these individual services, AWS global infrastructure including the Africa (Cape Town) Region, makes it easier for Learn Fresh to reach students in new countries without navigating extensive infrastructure procurement processes and operating physical data centers. It also helps deliver localized content closer to students, scale as participation grows, and support a reliable experience across the region.

A global game takes shape

What began as a board game and bold idea is now being rebuilt with AI and cloud technology to reach students it never could before. For Learn Fresh, the goal is to champion what’s possible when students gain access to this kind of learning.

In 2025, a 10-year-old from Adelaide, South Australia, became the first student from outside the United States to be part of the winning team in the NBA Math Hoops Global Championship in New York. Soon, Learn Fresh could be celebrating the first students from Africa to make that same journey to the Global Championship.

“AWS is committed to helping organizations build solutions that improve lives, and NBA Math Hoops is exactly the kind of program we want to see succeed,” said Francessca Vasquez, Vice President of Frontier AI Engineering and Services, AWS. “By combining Learn Fresh’s proven curriculum with NBA Africa’s reach and AWS AI and cloud technology, we can give students in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos, Dakar, and Cairo access to a learning experience that is engaging, personalized, and built to scale. This collaboration demonstrates what is possible when technology serves as a force for good.”

Educators in South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Senegal, Nigeria, and Morocco can register for training to bring NBA Math Hoops to their classrooms this fall.

This post was co-authored by Syed Hussain, Sr. Solutions Architect at AWS, and Nick Monzi, CEO and Cofounder at Learn Fresh.