Schoolgirl Angela Zhu has won a competition to create a character for an online education programme that teaches maths to thousands of pupils up and down the country.

The 11-year-old from Marylebone came up with a design for Octo the octopus, which has now been digitally created by a team of RM Technology education tutors for their online Easimaths programme merchandise.

Angela has won a programme kit for herself and her classmates at Queen’s College Preparatory School in Marylebone, which includes posters and stickers.

Maths exercises are illustrated by five animal characters in the programme — Swing the maths-loving monkey, Snap the crocodile, Squirt the clever elephant, Scuba the frog and Stripe the tiger.

But they needed another character to help children cope with maths problems and Angela came up with Octo with its eight limbs.  

“I was inspired because octopuses are very intelligent,” Angela said. “They learn complicated information and even have nine ‘brains’. You need to be smart to do maths.”

Angela’s school in Portland Place, near Regent’s Park, has been using the RM Technology website to help improve maths teaching in a fun way for children.

“The programme has helped me in maths,” she adds. “So I’m happy that Octo gets to be featured alongside the other characters.” 

The competition had 60 creative designs from children all over Britain, but Angela’s Octo was the best to join the other five characters to tackle fractions and work through times tables to solve problems.

The programme helps pupils aged four to 12 enjoy learning numerical skills.

RM Technology’s managing director Jason Tomlinson said: “It’s been quite a search finding the newest character for the programme but rewarding to see the pupils being so creative and now meeting ‘Octo’.

“There’ll be more opportunities for pupils to show their creativity and we’ll decide who could be added to the teaching group.”  

The programme devised by tutors in Oxford is being used by 80,000 pupils in about 300 schools all over the UK with 12,000 questions suitable for primary years. So far there have been 132 million questions which have been solved by pupils since the programme began, ultimately helping teachers making maths lessons engaging in the classroom.