Our Story

My name is Peter Costello. I was born and reared near a small town in Mayo, called Kilkelly. I have two sons and two daughters and it was when my youngest daughter was doing a child-care course in College that I came up with this idea. She was asked to come up with an educational game for children. I was always interested in numbers and sums. It was my favourite subject in my school days so when she mentioned this to me, I became very interested and we had a chat about it. We put our heads together and suddenly ‘Sumstart’ was born.

After coming up with the initial idea, I cut it out on cardboard to see if it would work. The most thing that amazed me about it is that it is so simple and yet there is nothing like it to be got anywhere. Sometimes the simple things are overlooked. With this board a child cannot get it wrong. Only the right combination of numbers will fill the slots. In the 10 slot for example there are 42 different combinations that will fill it. You cannot put more than 10 into the slot and anything less will not fill it.

While the project was on-going I called around to a lot of schools to look for advice from the teachers and I took on board all they had to say about making it child friendly, fun and easy to teach. I also had a lot of discussions with parents of young children to get their opinions. I got a few prototypes made, the first ones were made with Fomax material but I changed that to wood so that it is eco-friendly, as that is very important in these climate changing times. I am delighted with the result and with the response from teachers, parents and children.

It is very satisfying and makes me very happy to know that I can contribute in a small way to making learning be a fun thing. Children can learn to count, add, subtract and multiply on a colourful board and for those with a competitive edge there are games that can be played with a dice that will help to improve their mathematical skills. I hope your children get many hours of joy learning the basics of sums from this board.