Home court advantage

NBA Math Hoops is a board game designed for pupils from grade 3 to grade 8.

Calvin Sibert had been teaching seventh graders for around 20 years when he came across a basketball board game called NBA Math Hoops. He took it back to his pupils, who were struggling with basic maths, and watched their skills grow within just a few weeks. Learn Fresh is a US non-profit and NBA Math Hoops has been one of its programmes since 2012, run in association with NBA Cares (the basketball association’s community outreach programme). The game is designed for pupils from grade 3 to grade 8, an age group Sibert calls the sweet spot. 

“We don’t want to send students to high school not knowing how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, because that’s going to bring low confidence for the maths they have to do at the next level,” he says. After discovering the programme in 2016, Sibert joined Learn Fresh and today is the NPO’s chief mission officer, tasked with taking the game to new countries and training the coaches and teachers who run it.