NZGrapher was started in 2014 by Jake Wills, a New Zealand mathematics teacher, to solve a growing problem in statistics education: the need for a powerful, accessible graphing tool that could run on any device. Originally developed as part of the MathsNZ resources hub, it was designed to replace software requiring installation, ensuring that students could access high-quality statistical tools whether they were using a PC, Mac, Chromebook, or tablet.
Over the years, the platform evolved rapidly to meet the changing needs of the NCEA curriculum. Major updates introduced advanced features such as Bootstrapping, Randomisation, and Time Series analysis, making NZGrapher a "one-stop-shop" for NCEA Statistics from Level 1 to Level 3. Its ease of use and alignment with NCEA standards saw it quickly adopted by schools across the country, becoming the standard tool for teaching statistics in Aotearoa New Zealand.Â
MathsNZ began as a digital hub created by Jake Wills to support mathematics education across New Zealand. While NZGrapher is its most enduring success, the platform originally hosted a wide array of other products designed to digitise the classroom. This included MathsNZ Students, a learning portal featuring video tutorials, interactive lessons, and booklets for NCEA standards, and the MathsNZ Question Generator, a tool that allowed teachers to instantly create customised worksheets and on-screen practice questions for students.
In addition to student-facing tools, the site provided critical infrastructure for teachers through the MathsNZ Secure Assessment Bank and a vast repository of shared resources. These services allowed teachers to share internal assessments and teaching materials securely. For several years, MathsNZ also ran weekly quizzes and "Basic Facts" challenges, aiming to provide as much support as possible for both teaching and learning mathematics in New Zealand.
As NZGrapher's popularity exploded, the demands of maintaining such a broad suite of content-heavy platforms became unsustainable for a single person. To ensure the long-term stability of NZGrapher, the hard decision was made to retire the other MathsNZ services. Today, while the original MathsNZ resources remain accessible as an archive on old.mathsnz.com, the focus has shifted entirely to the development and support of NZGrapher, ensuring it remains a world-class statistical package for New Zealand schools.
To ensure the platform's long-term sustainability and continued development, NZGrapher moved to a standalone domain and introduced a low-cost subscription model for schools in 2020. This transition allowed for significant infrastructure upgrades, including offline functionality and new graph types tailored for the latest curriculum refreshes.
Today, NZGrapher serves hundreds of thousands of users annually, remaining committed to its original mission of providing intuitive, world-class statistical software for kiwi classrooms.
You can find more information about Jake's other projects at www.jpw.nz.