Powering screen-free STEM education for 5,000 preschool teachers in Vietnam with KidsEdu

It starts with a color card. A four-year-old in a remote Vietnamese preschool lays down a green card. Then a yellow. Then another green. A small robot on the table whirs to life, rolls forward, turns, and rolls again. She just wrote her first program, without a screen, application, or keyboard.

KidsEdu is a Vietnamese edtech organization powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is bringing certified science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education to preschoolers aged 3-6 in underserved communities. Its entire model is built on a paradox: the learning is immersive and analog, but the system only works because of the cloud.

KidsEdu’s coding system is simple, with green meaning go forward, yellow meaning turn, and red meaning stop. Kids arrange color cards in sequence to program robots, learning logic and problem-solving through play and building the foundation for more complex STEM concepts as they grow.

The organization’s broader curriculum does incorporate limited screen time for teacher-led storytelling and augmented reality activities, like coloring book pages that come to life in 3D on a teacher’s phone. The ratio, though, is deliberate with minimal screens and maximum hands-on time.

More than 5,000 teachers across Vietnam have been trained to deliver this curriculum since 2023, with a goal to reach 10,000 with support from the AWS Education Equity Initiative (EEI), a five-year, $100 million commitment that provides AI and cloud technology and technical expertise to organizations building digital learning solutions for underserved communities globally.

Building for the AI-ready generation

For students, the hands-on learning happens offline but everything supporting it doesn’t. Each day, teachers upload progress reports and parents check updates, creating massive traffic spikes at school start and pick-up time: approximately 1.5 million queries daily, concentrated in two intense bursts. Previously, on-premises servers buckled under these surges. Parents would wait … and wait.

Now, KidsEdu runs entirely on AWS with a serverless architecture that scales automatically, expanding from near-idle to approximately 1,000 parallel processing units in under five minutes. Responses are up to 90 percent faster, and because KidsEdu only pays for the computing power it actually uses, costs stay low enough to keep school fees affordable. Since the platform handles children’s data, each school’s information is isolated across independent databases with multiple security layers protecting every request.

The children in these classrooms today will enter the workforce around 2040. By then, generative AI will be as fundamental as reading. KidsEdu is already planning for that, using Amazon Bedrock to help teachers create lesson plans quickly and design personalized learning paths for children with diverse personalities and learning speeds. It’s also using AI to train preschool teachers in foreign languages as part of a roadmap to introduce English in early childhood education.

The foundation being built now, with color cards and coloring books and a serverless platform humming behind it all, is what prepares these kids to thrive in a world where AI is a given.

AWS programs making it possible

KidsEdu’s collaboration with AWS goes beyond standard cloud services, and the company has benefitted from two key social impact programs. In this first year, the AWS Education Equity Initiative supported 300+ organizations in more than 40 countries, with 76 percent integrating AI into their education solutions. For KidsEdu, the support from AWS directly reduced operational costs, making the “equip first, collect later” model financially viable for schools that could never have afforded STEM education otherwise.

KidsEdu also participated in the AWS Social Entrepreneur Accelerator (SEA) in collaboration with Deloitte, which engaged 71 leaders from 42 organizations across 17 countries. The accelerator supported KidsEdu in applying Amazon Bedrock to real-world use cases and connected the company with other edtech social enterprises from multiple countries to accelerate collaboration and growth.

Through programs like EEI and SEA, AWS is an active partner in bringing down the cost of early STEM education, providing KidsEdu with both technical infrastructure and financial runway to reach communities that couldn’t otherwise afford it.

Somewhere in rural Vietnam, a four-year-old just programmed a robot with color cards. She’ll never know about the 1.5 million queries, auto-scaling, or security layers protecting her data. All she’s concerned with right now is that green means go.

This post was co-authored by Aimee Miller, Communications Manager at AWS, and Eugene Neubronner, PR Manager at AWS.