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Mathomat is a trademark used for a plastic stencil developed in Australia in 1969, and still widely specified in Australian schools mainly for students at early secondary school level. The stencil has a large number of geometric shapes stencils combined with the
functions of a technical drawing set (rulers, set squares, protractor and circles stencils to replace a compass). The combination of these features and the practical ability to store the template in a folder makes it useful for encouraging students to use drawing as part their studies. Teachers tend to support its adoption in schools because this encouragement for students to draw fosters mental imagery which is an important, but difficult to teach, part of their learning of geometry. The Mathomat template was invented in 1969 by Craig Young; who originally worked as an engineering tradesperson in the Government Aircraft Factory (GAF) in Melbourne before retraining as a mathematics teacher and spending most of his working life as head of mathematics in a secondary school in Melbourne. Craig Young saw the limitations of traditional mathematics drawing sets in classrooms, mainly caused by students losing parts of the sets, and designed Mathomat as a better alternative. The template took advantage of a newly developed plastic (for the time) called polycarbonate which was strong and transparent enough to allow for a large number of shapes stencils to be included in its design without breaking or tearing. The first template was exhibited in 1970 at a mathematics conference in Melbourne along with a series of popular lesson plan ideas for it for mathematics teaching; it became an immediate success with a large number of schools specifying it as a required students purchase. The manufacturing of Mathomat was taken over in 1989 by the W&G drawing instrument company which had a factory in Melbourne for manufacture of technical drawing instruments. W&G published a series of teacher resource books for Mathomat authored by various teachers and academics who were interested in Mathomat as a teaching product. The template design was revised in 1999.
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