This guy

We had those but they were all blue

I thought those were skrewed up crayons.( in the pic not in real life)

I saw that once (all in natural wooden color) when I was living in Cameroon in the very early 2000's and the teacher proceeded to tell us that "we used to explain with that but... yeah guess I'll give it a try but that's a bit outdated". We ended up using them for half an hour and everyone agreed to resume doing normal math because we didn't need them to understand.

I used numbers, like a real person.