A big part of the solution to getting young children to learn math in the poorest, most educationally backward parts of the world may be just simple items such as coloured rings on strings, plastic blocks of different sizes and multihued circles, triangles and squares. “The kids take a lot of interest when we use these things. They don’t see it as work then,” says Revati Mathyal, a teacher in a northern India school who’s working with a class of 16 students in a mix of grades one through five. “When we use traditional methods of teaching math, it takes time for them to understand. This is all so colourful and attractive.”

The strategy seems to be working. Before it was adopted, only 41 percent of second-grade students surveyed in Uttarakhand, the Himalayan state where the school is located, could do simple addition. This has now risen to 91 percent. Similarly, the share of students who can do simple subtraction jumped from 33 percent to 89 percent; for multiplication it went from 25 percent to 83 percent; and for division, 15 percent to 73 percent.

Vineet Nayar, a former vice chairman and chief executive of the information-technology giant HCL Technologies, and his wife, Anupama, are behind this effort. Their New Delhi-based Sampark Foundation is rolling out kits with these child-friendly teaching aids to 50,000 government schools and 3 million students across Uttarakhand and another poor state southeast of there, Chhattisgarh. (A smaller-scale programme is also afoot in Jammu & Kashmir.) The kits cover 23 basic math concepts.