The story of Clockwork Fox is the story of a film company that wanted a digital product and ended up with an educational technology startup backed by a $1 million equity investment.

St. John’s-based Clockwork Fox made headlines in business circles last month when it closed a million-dollar round of funding, led by Killick Capital and Venture Newfoundland and Labrador.

It was the latest chapter in a success story that began when Ed Martin, the head of St. John’s-based film company Best Boy Productions, decided his company needed a digital arm and assigned his son, Edward J. Martin, to work on it.

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The result is Clockwork Studios, which makes educational games to teach math to young elementary school students. These games, called Zorbit’s Math Adventure, allow children to proceed at their own pace, and teachers to track their progress and optimize lessons for a classroom of individuals.

At the core of it is this concept called game-based learning, which is naturally fun to play – it has characters and structure,” said Edward J. Martin in an interview. “It’s hard (for a production company) to do. It has to engage the students. And you have to get the assessment for the teacher out of it.”

When they set out, the Martins had an idea of doing digital derivations of the Best Boy films, but their development work began to turn out math games. As they produced different iterations of the product, they came up with a game that helped parents and pre-school children work on math at home. Then they began to work something that would work within a school environment.

Testing it with educational specialists at Kent State University in Ohio, they found that a child using the program for as little as one hour a week for three months ended up being six months ahead of his or her peers in terms of basic math education.

That was when Edward J. Martin moved to full time management of the company. He grew the team to improve the animation and work in school curriculum. They built in an analytics tool for teachers that allowed them to identify students who were having problems and what the problems were, as well as students who were excelling.

Not long ago, the younger Martin was at an educational conference in Toronto and found himself telling another delegate about Zorbit’s Math Adventure. It turned out she was the Vice-President of Education at the book publisher Scholastic Canada. The next day they had a three-hour meeting at her office in Markham, Ont., which resulted as Scholastic signing on as distributor of the Zorbit series. Together, they launched the Kindergarten product last September. The Grade 1 version is due out this month and Grade 2 in August.

This week, Edward J. Martin is in Columbus, Ohio, at the Ohio Educational Technology Conference, working toward the first U.S. launch of the product.

So far, Clockwork Fox has 18 employees, 13 of whom are developers. Now the company has landed funding to help it further develop its list of products.

Venture NL is a public-private investment fund managed by Pelorus Venture Capital of Halifax. Killick Capital is a private St. John’s based funded headed by Mark Dobbin. The other investors in the round were Newfoundland investors from Pluto Investments, Petten Holdings, and Joe Antle.