Mathique
Professor Hoot
the baking professor
Pieville’s baker-scholar and the owner of the Golden Mathpie recipe. He teaches every new method before your child is asked to use it.
Year 3 · Ages 7–8
The Great Pie Festival
A woodland comic about the biggest bake-off of the year. Place value, times tables and first fractions, one pie at a time.
The story
Every year the woodland village of Pieville holds the Great Pie Festival, and Professor Hoot bakes the legendary Golden Mathpie from a secret recipe. This year Magnus the Magpie swoops in, shreds the recipe and scatters the pieces across Number Valley, the Rocket Works, the Pie Kitchens, the Shape Caverns and the Star Observatory. Your child signs on as Hoot’s apprentice baker, and every mission solved wins back one torn piece of the recipe.
How it looks
Full-bleed comic pages on aged cream paper: chunky hand-drawn outlines, flat saturated colour and halftone dots, with the numbers built into the scene on rocket stages, market stalls and the clock tower.
Meet the cast
Professor Hoot and Pip the Fox carry the story. Your child is the one who can actually do the maths, so the cast set up every clue and react to every answer, and the solving is left to them.
Pip the Fox
the brave one
Leaps before counting, then learns to slow down and check. The friend most Year 3 children recognise instantly.
Splash the Otter
the gadgeteer
Measures, weighs and times everything in sight. Carries the jugs, the scales and the stopwatch, so the measurement topics have someone to belong to.
Bram the Hedgehog
the careful collector
Anxious but meticulous, double-checks his working, and hoards anything useful: coins, shells, conkers.
Magnus the Magpie
the thief
Steals anything shiny, including numbers. His puzzle-locks guard the road between lands, and there is more to him than the theft.
What your child practises in Year 3
The Great Pie Festival follows the national curriculum for England, in the order a Year 3 class meets it. Every strand below is covered by the story, and Parent HQ reports progress back in exactly these words:
- Number & place value
- Addition & subtraction
- Multiplication & division
- Fractions
- Measurement
- Shape & angles
- Statistics
155 story missions in all, plus four boss gates: mixed-review checkpoints that have to be passed before the story moves on, so a skill is proved rather than assumed.
Start with the assessment, not the story
The free start-of-year assessment comes first: twenty questions, two per topic, dressed as your child’s first mission in this world. It shows you which Year 3 strands are solid and which are not, before they spend a single evening on the wrong thing.
The other three worlds
- Year 4: The Soggy Biscuit Detective Agency · Ages 8–9
- Year 5: S.U.M.S. · Ages 9–10
- Year 6: The Crystal Core · Ages 10–11