EdTechCustom AppBranding2016

EduCode

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An experiential coding curriculum that teaches kids to engineer software through animated micro-lessons, gamified projects, and a self-paced platform now used by 650K learners across 160 countries.

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Year

2016

When founder Guyverson Vernous launched EduCode in Moncton in 2016, the data was brutal. New Brunswick had 2,800 unfilled tech jobs across the province — 900 in Moncton alone — alongside a 10.2% unemployment rate. The talent was here. The pipeline was not.

Schools that wanted to teach coding had two bad options: block-based playground tools that never translated to real engineering, or college-grade textbooks that no Grade 5 student could parse. Teachers without coding backgrounds had nothing they could actually deliver in a classroom.

The result was a generation of kids treated as consumers of technology in a region that desperately needed creators. Worse, the few computer science programs that existed were concentrated in English-only urban centres, leaving French-language schools and rural districts without a credible path.

Vernous, a Haitian-Canadian entrepreneur and former media instructor at McKenzie College, watched smart students drop out of CS because the on-ramp was inaccessible — not because the kids couldn't learn it. The mission, in his words, was "to build a bridge for all students, to help them go from a consumer of technology to understanding and becoming the creator of that technology."

Our Approach

We built EduCode as a turnkey curriculum platform that any teacher, regardless of coding experience, could run on day one. The system pairs animated micro-lessons — over 810 of them, scripted as cinematic stories rather than dry tutorials — with a real code editor, instant feedback, and gamified projects that ladder from JavaScript at age 10 to Web Development, Game Development, and Data Science by age 14.

Students learn actual production languages: JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Python, C++. The pedagogy is deliberate: watch the lesson, write real code, get feedback in real time, ship a project to a public gallery. The teacher dashboard lets a non-technical instructor preview every lesson the day before, with answer keys and intervention prompts, so they walk into class confident even when the topic is brand new to them.

The original brick-and-mortar Creative Centre opened at 100 Cameron Street in Moncton on May 1, 2016. A year later, the Government of New Brunswick partnered with us to pilot the platform during Innovation Week (May 2017) — Education Minister Brian Kenny announced a four-school deployment in Kedgwick, Bathurst, Tracadie, and Fredericton, with Grade 7 students working through 60-minute coding sessions weekly for four weeks while their teachers were upskilled in parallel.

We also ran an after-school cohort in Moncton with roughly 300 students who built websites and video games and shipped them at a year-end fair.

The Results

EduCode now serves more than 650,000 learners across 160 countries. The platform ships four full curriculum tracks (267 JavaScript activities, 160 in Game Development, 136 in Web Development, 125 in Data Science), 810+ animated lessons, and a per-student subscription that starts at $19.99/mo.

International franchise partners run distribution in Canada, the USA, UAE, India (Foreign Scope Consultants, appointed February 2021), Africa, and Turkey. Annual revenue crossed $850K with no outside funding raised.

Standout student outcomes include Jean-Luc Jaillet, who shipped Color Bounce — a puzzle game that ranked #14 in the Canadian App Store puzzle category — as a teenager.

In July 2020, Peter Hess (Mount Allison Commerce, Purdue MBA, 30+ years in business across Canada and the US, including nine years at John Deere and five years leading the NB Aerospace and Defence Association) took the CEO role to scale the international franchise model; Vernous moved to Board Chair to focus on the broader iCubeLabs portfolio.

The original mission still holds: build the bridge from consumer to creator. The proof is 650,000 students walking it.

What We Delivered

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