Find an afterschool program that helps your student think like a problem solver — not just in school but in life. AoPS Academy helps students in grades 1–12 build the confidence to take a challenge-first approach. Our comprehensive math, science, and language arts courses go beyond fundamentals: we equip students with the tools to solve complex problems, make lifelong connections, and prepare for top colleges and competitive careers.
1. Focus on Building Versatile Skills, Not Constant Drills
AoPS believes students learn best when they are challenged with problems they may not know how to do. AoPS trains students to approach hard problems by breaking them down into familiar parts.
In our classes, when a student is working at the right level of challenge, they won’t get perfect scores on every assignment. That can take some getting used to, particularly if they’ve always been a straight-A student.
At AoPS Academy, students practice advanced problem solving and conceptual understanding— not rote memorization. By the end of any course, students have developed the skills to precisely explain their ideas, questions, and solutions across any subject and topic they tackle.
2. Find a Community of Peers at Your Student’s Level
Learning is most effective when done collaboratively, through strong community connections. Our students are curious, thoughtful, and always ready to try something new. They develop collaborative relationships with their classmates as they explore new ideas together. Throughout the year, AoPS Academy holds events such as contests, movie nights, and other themes for our community to get together and have fun — not only for our students, but for any friends they wish to bring with them.
3. Learn With Expert Instructors
AoPS instructors treat the classroom as a conversation, not a lecture. Once outstanding students themselves, our instructors are trained to support their students to reach their full potential. They are not in the classroom to give answers — they ask questions to help facilitate discussions and encourage students to attempt different strategies to explore challenging concepts on a deeper level.
4. Dive Deeper With World-Class Curriculum
With curricula based in deep subject mastery, students build a critical skill set that prepares them for all of life’s challenges. Elementary-level students use Beast Academy: a comic-style curriculum that follows the adventures of four little monsters as they model mathematical conversations and problem solving strategies. For upper level math, students transition over to the AoPS math textbooks, which cover prealgebra through calculus and have been used in over 100 countries. Similarly, our language arts program helps students develop powerful communication skills in critical reading, writing, and speaking. In each course, students explore successful techniques across multiple genres and formats as they establish and expand core language arts skills such as reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, rhetoric, and more. We are just getting started with our science program, but the AoPS approach is a natural fit. Students discover a love of scientific discovery as they explore the real-life phenomena that make up the natural world. They are motivated to explore new questions and develop the skills to collect and analyze data as they seek answers to these questions. Students practice the engineering and modeling process, including how to refine experiments based on trials and new evidence.
5. Train for Competitions With Winning Strategies
Since 1993, AoPS has trained top students to compete internationally. In 2024, the USA team took first place in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), with five golds and one silver.
AoPS believes that competitions help students explore new creative ideas for problem solving and further expand their resilience to face tough challenges in the future. In addition to contest courses, AoPS hosts internal math and language arts competitions to foster camaraderie and allow students to practice new skills in a friendly environment. AoPS also hosts the following national math competitions for students who cannot take them in school: Math Kangaroo, MAA
American Mathematics Competition 8, MAA American Mathematics Competition 10, and American Invitational Mathematics Exam.
How to Start the Enrollment Process
Our team wants to help students reach their full potential — and that means starting with the right level of challenge to build confidence and encourage students to go further.
Schedule a consultation with a director to find the best courses for your student’s level and goals, including placement tests for math, science, and language arts. You can start the enrollment process on the AoPS Academy website.
