COTOY didn't start in a warehouse.
It started in a classroom.

For 32 years, Najwa Awawdi stood in front of a classroom as a math teacher, and she loved every year of it. But the closer she came to retirement, the more one truth kept bothering her: teaching had not caught up with the children walking through the door.

Year after year she watched bright, capable children quietly decide they were simply “not math people.” Not because they lacked the ability, but because they lost their footing early — at the age when a child's whole sense of number is still being built — and a full curriculum rarely leaves time to go back and find it again.

Najwa knew this was never the fault of teachers, who do extraordinary work with the time they are given. It is the shape of the system itself: built to move thirty children forward together, when understanding arrives at thirty different speeds. She spent three decades watching good teachers fight that constraint — and decided her final act as an educator would be to hand them a better tool.

So instead of easing into retirement, she started building. From 2020, Najwa developed a full mathematics curriculum for elementary children — not to replace what they learn at school, but to run alongside it: more hands-on, more engaging, and built to give children back the one thing so many of them lose. Confidence. That curriculum, and the games she designed to teach it, became COTOY.