Spending hours staring at streams of mind-numbing figures and indecipherable calculations at any age can quickly nullify the brain, temporarily robbing it of creative stimulation via mathematical lobotomy.

But it is during the years spent navigating primary school where attention spans are more prone to drift and minds are more likely to trail off in a daydream.

A former headteacher, however, has now devised an innovative and refreshing visual learning tool with the hope of re-coupling the young with the wonders of maths and thought-provoking intricacies of computation along with his wife, Kate.

James Aylott, 39, of Evergreen Drive, Colchester, spent 16 years working in primary schools and the final two as head of Dedham Church of England Primary School.

But after a desire to try something new started to creep in, James boldly quit the profession, exiling himself from the constraints of a by-the-book learning system in search of a more imaginative way to teach maths.

James said: “I wanted to be more creative and help children learn and I’d had an idea for something that would help children with maths, so I took a leap-of-faith and left my job to create it.”

The result was an interactive venture called Number Stacks, which consists of stackable place-value counters and online tutorial videos fronted by James which help parents who are supporting their children with a series of visual demonstrations of the activities.

The premise for the invention, rather scientifically, is to develop the child’s number sense, which is an intuitive understanding of a number’s actual value as opposed to it simply being an abstract digit which is just part of a sequence.

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The physicality of the hands-on approach and colourful equipment, which is included in a purchasable resource kit, means the children can focus on understanding the concept as they don’t have to hold calculations in their head.

James said: “Children can manipulate the numbers by adding more counters or removing them, which helps with learning adding and subtracting, and by making several groups of the same number or splitting a larger number into groups, like multiplication and division.

“They quickly learn the that when you get ten ones, you have to swap for a tens counter and soon realise that this applies to the rest of the number system too.”

“As their confidence builds the children gradually move away from using the counters.”

The interactive maths resource was derived from years of trial and error and experiencing what forms of teaching captured the imagination of the children and what experiments had a less successful impact.

He said: “I guess I had been testing this for the last 16 years really as I have learnt from my teaching mistakes, so I have built up a really good understanding of the journey from learning to count right through to multiplying and dividing fractions.

“I’ve tried many different approaches to help children understand - lots of which didn’t work - and have based Number Stacks on the methods that seemed to be the most effective.”

Before the launch of Number Stacks in March, James spent many evenings tutoring groups of children, often using the arrangement as an opportunity to test out his methods.

His two daughters, Jess, seven, and Holly, four, were also used as “guinea pigs” and often enjoyed the new approach to learning.

James said: “We’re absolutely delighted that it has taken off and we’ve just shifted out 100th kit.

“Now orders have increased, our dining room has turned into a mini-warehouse and we all join in together to package up the counters whenever we get a new delivery.

“It feels great to be helping children all around the country and we have received some lovely feedback from our early users, saying how Number Stacks has helped their children master things they had previously struggled with.

“People often ask me if I feel I made the right decision in leaving my job as headteacher and I always answer yes without any hesitation.”

For more information about Number Stacks visit numberstacks.co.uk.