Why I built WorksheetWizard

Blake Fucile, founder

It started at a kitchen table

I did not invent the idea behind this app. My parents did, at our kitchen table, somewhere around Year 3.

The routine never changed. I would come in from sport, or we would finish dinner, and one of them would put a piece of scrap paper in front of me with about ten questions on it. Times tables mostly. Some spelling. It never took longer than twenty minutes.

I hated it. Genuinely hated it. My mates were on Minecraft and I was doing seven times eight for the fourth night that week. I cannot remember a single evening where I thought this is good for me.

What I did not understand at the time is that they were not really teaching me maths. They were building a habit, and habits are built by turning up often, not by turning up hard. Ten minutes a night for a few years does something that a two hour session on a Saturday never will.

I was an average primary school student. Middle and below-average bands for Maths and English, the kind of kid a report card describes as settling in nicely. That scrap paper is the only thing I can point to that changed the direction. I finished school with a 97.85 ATAR and got into my first choice course at the University of Melbourne.

Then I saw it from the other side

Years later I ended up on the other side of the same table.

I spent five years tutoring, most of it through a school service program working with disadvantaged kids, a lot of them first and second generation immigrants. Bright kids, all of them. Kids whose parents were working two jobs and could not sit down at seven at night with a piece of scrap paper, or could not do it in English if they wanted to.

I would see a student once a week for an hour. I would explain fractions well, they would understand fractions well, and eight days later it was gone. Not because they were not capable. Because once a week is not a habit, it is an appointment.

The kids who moved were the ones doing something small and regular in between. Every single time. That is the whole lesson of five years, and it is not a complicated one.

Why it costs $14.99 and not $320

Private tutoring in Melbourne runs at $80 a session and up. It only really works at two or three sessions a week, which is the part nobody puts on the website. Do the maths and an invested parent is paying somewhere around $320 a month.

That number decides which kids get help. Not which kids need it.

I think that is wrong. Basic education should not be a luxury. So WorksheetWizard starts at $14.99 a month, and the plan that covers four children still costs less than a single tutoring session.

What it is, and what it is not

It is a practice aid. It does not replace a teacher, and it does not replace a tutor for a child who needs one on one help. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

It is built to be printed, because a child sitting at a table with a pencil is doing something different to a child tapping answers on a tablet, and because the parent needs to be in the room. That is not nostalgia. It is the only version of this that ever worked on me.

Every question is mapped to the Victorian Curriculum F-10 Version 2.0, with the official descriptor code printed on the answer key so you can check it yourself. A large share of the Maths questions have their answers worked out by code rather than written by AI, because a wrong answer on a printed page cannot be quietly fixed later.

If it does what it did for me, your child will resent it for a while and thank you a long time afterwards.