Language Teacher, Inventor

Career:
I studied Performing Arts at the Welsh College of Music and Drama. I didn’t want to act and instead, I went into training. I worked in youth training and customer care and delivered customer care training programmes for a major bank in London. I moved to Belgium and learnt Dutch and French while teaching presentation skills to businessmen. I also taught English as a foreign language. I then moved to Germany and learnt German. When I came back to Britain, I did a teacher training course and began teaching German at Llanishen Comprehensive. Whilst there, the idea of talking dice came to me.

The idea:
In school, I found learning languages as a pupil very dry and tedious. When I went to live abroad, I found out very quickly that the best way to learn a language is by speaking it. The new methods of language teaching prove this. I invented the talking dice as a game to encourage oral skills. The dice are covered with pictures and students construct sentences using what appears when the dice are thrown. The dice really encouraged students to use the language and my colleagues suggested that I market the idea. It’s grown and is really successful!

The big break:
I had no idea where to sell the idea and my partner and I began with a mail shot to a randomly-selected 1000 schools. Two days later we had our first cheque! Now we’re getting orders every day.

Highlight:
I made a presentation about the dice to PGCE students at Swansea and at Cardiff colleges and we nearly sold out, there was so much interest! A real highlight for us is sending our dice overseas - Poland, Germany and Switzerland. We also had a real thrill sending dice to an island off Scotland, where the school has 30 pupils in total and to Jersey where the dice are used in the teaching of Jerriais.

Low:
Just as we were about to launch, we had a crisis of self-confidence. There is a risk to self-financing. However, we decided that we had gone so far that we had to try!

Tips from the top:
Go with your gut feeling! Believe in yourself and trust your instincts. Work out your finances and budget before you start and organise a business plan. Listen to what other people have to say... even if you don’t take their advice.