The world of children’s apps is a varied place, but it’s not often we see a former White House adviser and winner of Harvard’s annual teaching prize in economics chancing their arm.

Todd Buchholz is exactly that though: he’s the inventor of a maths-teaching technique called Math Arrow that relies on patterns of numbers rather than traditional mathematical drills.

Now the technique has been turned into an iPad app called Math Arrow: Kyle Counts by Todd’s own mobile developer Sproglit. It involves guiding a kangaroo named Kyle home by connecting numbers on a map.

Buchholz is certainly ambitions. “I was in Paris, staring at the crossbeams of the Eiffel Tower, and then in New York and Chicago, looking at the Citicorp tower and the Hancock building,” he says about his inspiration for the system.

“They are made up of evenly spaced support structures. I wondered, why can’t we create a physical structure, like these buildings, to enable children to visualise the structure of arithmetic with their own eyes?”

The app is aimed at 3-13 year-olds – a huge range in terms of maths ability, but there are three difficulty levels to span those ages.

Math Arrow: Kyle Counts costs £2.99 for iPad on Apple’s App Store.