Educational groups First Mobile Education of Fredericton and Binogi of Stockholm have announced the signing of an international partnership.

In a statement, the companies said the partnership will help create a multi-linguistic, multi-year, educational curriculum delivered via 2D animated digital video, to be offered across Canada and world-wide.

Gary Stairs, First Mobile’s CEO, said the collaboration complements First Mobile’s original mandate from 2013, which is to export Canadian education and deliver it on a world class mobile platform to emerging markets like China, India and Brazil.

“Here in Canada, we intend to emulate Binogi’s recent language project success in Europe and Africa,” he said.  “For us, the timing couldn’t be better.” 

He said that over the past few years, First Mobile has developed a suite of four mobile-ready education games for k-12, funded in part by the New Brunswick Industry Innovation Challenge.

Recently, the company began to create STEM career choice games for k-12 with an emphasis on 20 bilingual engineering and geo-science careers, including environmental stewardship and conservation. 

“This latest work fits with First Mobile’s vision of ed-tech futures for the Atlantic region, particularly experiential and entrepreneurial education,” he said in the statement.

Speaking on behalf of Binogi, CEO Linus Gunnarson said the partnership will help the company establish the non-profit in Canada.

“Binogi is now in nine different languages and opening its fifth international operation, both in Toronto and here in Atlantic Canada," he said.

The partnership hopes to assist immigrants and the agencies who are supporting them, both in Atlantic and Central Canada. This could entail the use of smart technologies such as interactive video and AI to improve the social inclusion of refugees.

Binogi was started in 2011 in Sweden by two students and a serial entrepreneur/investor who aimed to make school curricula more engaging by putting the lessons on film.  

By 2015, Binogi had produced 1,000 video lessons and written 16,000 quiz questions. Sweden has given refuge to many Syrian refugees and Binogi has worked to put the whole secondary school curriculum on film and dub it into Arabic.