I still love Muji and feel fortunate that I work around the block from their Soho store. On the Muji website, I just discovered their "Fun in the Bag Math" which is great set of wooden tiles that demonstrate fractions, in a visual and tactile way. The tiles show the relative size of fractions. Muji's elegant design sensibility balances the math geek part of my brain with the design geek part of my brain.

I'm a firm believer in the importance of building mental math models as well as the need for lots of practice, but that doesn't mean aesthetics have to be sacrificed. I wonder if people wouldn't be as afraid of math if we grew up with more toys like this example which presents math as play.