Like many people, I got immersed in the agonies of education in Lockdown. My children - let's call them Bart, Lisa and Maggie - all got assigned work on worksheets and apps. None of them thrived on them.

	Bart - who has ADD - hated maths because he felt he was bad at it. When faced with a difficult question, he just got it into his head that it was something he wouldn't be able to do. That one thought was so big, there wasn't room in there to work out how to do it.
	Lisa - bright and conscientous - hated the maths sites she'd been assigned because they weren't challenging and she was forced to play frustrating and irrelevant games after every question (made worse by trying to do them on a laptop with a trackpad). It was like a treadmill. You could see her enthusiasm for learning deflating a little with each session.
	Maggie - aged 6, had terrible maths anxiety. She took it very personally when she got a question wrong. Each maths session started with tears, and went downhill from there. She was too upset to think. She made so much noise about it that nobody else could think either. We dreaded even mentioning the word.

Something had to change.

Enter Dad.

The apps could be much better. They didn't really encourage new learning at all - there seemed to be no time for it. They didn't encourage the right frame of mind. Before 0maths, I'd been running a software company for over 25 years. I could fix it for my children.

Initially each question type was a sticking plaster - something that could cover what they needed for that week. The important thing was that I could embrace their learning styles.

• If a question's too difficult, let's make it easier until you get the base skills.
• You don't like wrong answers? Well, let's get rid of those - I'll just tell you when it's right. If it's not right you can have another look at it - I bet you'll work it out.
• Got this? What, already? Ok then, let's see where you can take this skill.

Version 0.1 was crude and clunky. It was just one bald Dad's zany project. Nevertheless, I thought others might benefit so I put a post up on Facebook. One morning about a week later I logged on to find that, in that moment, nearly 2,000 children were using that scruffy little prototype.

Enter Imposter syndrome.

Having so many children looking to me for guidance felt like a huge responsibility.

What did I know about education? Why, in trying to please my own children, was the approach I came up with so different to all the other maths sites? Does a red cross and a low score teach anything? (No) Does a race against the clock help children improve? (again, no) Why are most of the other maths apps multiple choice? The good news for 0maths is that psychologists have done a lot of work on what makes learning effective (mostly not multiple choice, it turns out). If a child is going to entrust me with 10 minutes of their life, I owe it to them to ensure they learn as much as possible in that 10 minutes.

If people were using 0maths, I had a duty to make it as good as it could possibly be. Refining and expanding 0maths has been a full time occupation since Lockdown. I won't claim it's finished - it never will be; there'll always be new material to add. But it is very very good - kids using 0maths are likely to progress faster than kids using the old behemoths that my own kids so hated in Lockdown.