Ooka Island, the P.E.I. software company dedicated to teaching children to read, has launched the web-based version of its program in time for Charlottetown’s Reading Town week starting on Saturday.

The company, which hired a new CEO and raised capital last year, has competed a year-and-a-half of work on a new product and website. Both will be launched this weekend as part of the reading celebration in Charlottetown.

Ooka Island was founded by Kay MacPhee, a teacher, researcher and entrepreneur who sold an earlier reading venture, SpellRead, for more than $20 million in 2006. Two years later, she teamed up with her granddaughter Joelle MacPhee and others to launch Ooka Island with the belief that an online game would be accessible and thus help more children.

“Reading achievement in the early years is highly correlated to success later in life,” said Joelle MacPhee, the company’s marketing director. “With our new web-based version it now means East Coast parents can easily access the program online and get their little learners on the path to becoming confident readers.”

Ooka Island has set out to gamify reading for children in primary to Grade 2. The child becomes a hero tasked with finding missing books and helping Ooka Elves to learn how to read.  As they play the game, they are exposed to 80 hours of play and 85 eBooks. The company says the curriculum includes 7,000 distinct steps culminating in the mastery of all five foundational skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.

The company made a major move last summer when it hired Kelly Shaw, an executive at Pearson North America, as its new CEO. She oversaw the opening of the company’s Toronto office, a $900,000 fundraising and revamped the business model.

The Ooka Island product until now has been downloadable and targeted mainly at schools. With the new launch, it will be web-based, meaning less hassle for the user, and the focus is now more on parents than schools.

“Kelly has accelerated the development of our proprietary Adaptive Learning Platform, which continually analyzes a child’s progress and plots a personalized path towards mastery of the five foundational reading skills,” said Joelle MacPhee. “Our platform is the engine that drives Ooka Island's success and it is multi-lingual and multi-subject capable.”

The product is now launching on desktops and the company plans to have tablet and mobile products in Android and iOS by August. It is now in talks to place Ooka Island in Apple’s App Store, which is eager to increase its educational offerings.

The product has already gained traction and has about 3,000 paying retail customers. MacPhee said Ooka Island will continue to sell to schools but the company will focus more on a business-to-consumer sales strategy.

As part of the launch and Reading Town Week in Charlottetown, Ooka Island will have a with a roving “Say Ooka!” booth moving around Charlottetown on Saturday. Families can get their picture taken on Ooka Island and be entered to win a one-year subscription to the program valued at $89.99.

MacPhee declined to discuss new funding efforts.