About Shortcut Games

Shortcut Games is a business established to create educational board games to develop and enhance foundational numeracy skills the fun way.

My philosophy in a Nutshell

My name is Gene Graham. I am the founder of Shortcut Games, a business established to create educational board games to develop and enhance foundational numeracy skills. I am essentially, an educator. Rarely does a day go by without an opportunity for me to teach or to tell somebody something new. Even as a child, I found joy in teaching new things to my younger siblings whether it be in sport, schoolwork or what to say to avoid the strap when their behaviour was questionable. It was not always well received but I did it anyway. Now, having spent 10 years as a primary school teacher, I have learnt to impart my knowledge in effective, targeted, and meaningful ways. Children are especially receptive to learning new things if it is presented in ways that inspire them while in an environment of challenge and excitement. I made sure that I included at least one maths game into my lesson planning each day. As a result, my students were not only enjoying their learning, but I found that they were recalling their number facts more readily and confidently applying these skills to more complex problems.

Bit of a Backstory

In 2007, I was in my second year of study for a Bachelor of Education. At the time, I was looking for a tastier alternative to noodles and coffee to drag me through exam cram sessions and assignment preparation. I began tutoring primary school children in Maths and English to earn some extra cash. It was during one of these sessions that I discovered that a particular young person found it difficult to grasp basic number facts. This was holding him back from developing his general mathematics skills. It was the Swiss Psychologist, Jean Piaget who said that at about the age of seven children begin to learn through playing structured games with established rules including board games. Remembering this, I quickly drew up a game board, based on a Snakes and Ladders format, on the back of an old manilla folder. I handed him two dice to throw and invited him to add, subtract, multiply or divide the numbers that turned up. The result of the operation was the number of spaces he could move along the track. The object of the game was to be the first to reach the end of the track (he beat me on his first go). I could see his enthusiasm build as the session went on. He became more excited about winning the game than learning his number facts.

The Dream is Real

Earlier in the tutoring session, I explained to him that there were no shortcuts to learning mathematics. As it turned out, there was. I decided to call the game, Shortcut. Over the next few weeks, his parents reported significant improvements in his maths scores at school. So, Shortcut Games was born. Shortcut Games endeavours to provide teachers with resources that compliment existing methods of teaching mathematics. It is hoped that in the future, board games will form as much a part of teaching pedagogy as workbooks and the manipulation of concrete materials.