The staff of Ooka Island Inc. gathered at their Charlottetown office a few weeks ago to watch the educational software company’s pitch on CBC’s Dragons’ Den.

One staff member’s smartphone was logged on to the company’s e-commerce site, which pings every time Ooka Island gets a new client.

As the pitch was broadcast, the phone began to ping and ping until it sounded like a drum roll. The sound eventually died down, only to happen each hour as the show was broadcast in the next time zone and then the next.

“That started a pretty steady stream (of sales) for about the next two weeks,” said Joelle MacPhee, one of the company’s co-founder and director of reading partnerships, as she sipped a coffee in Halifax last weekend.

MacPhee did not leave Dragons’ Den with the $1.5 million she was seeking, but she came close and increased the company’s visibility.

Overall, she said, the company’s online traffic post-Dragons has risen about 900 per cent from a year earlier, and its e-commerce sales about 500 per cent without spending a nickel on marketing.

But MacPhee and her six colleagues are only getting started with the company. Ooka Island’s aim is to eradicate illiteracy — not to reduce it, but to do away with it.

Their tool is Ooka Island’s comprehensive early literacy program that helps children ages three to seven learn to read. What’s special about its technology is that it is adaptive, which means that the system analyzes the students’ results, determines their strengths and weaknesses and then formulates customized programs that help them through areas that give them problems.

The software is the product of MacPhee’s family’s long association with literacy. After Joelle’s father, Lowell, was born profoundly deaf in 1960, her grandmother, Kay MacPhee, began to train in programs that helped hearing-impaired individuals develop language skills and learn to read. Kay MacPhee refined her own program and launched SpellRead in 1994, which sold for $20 million in 2006.

But the MacPhees were still on a mission to end illiteracy.

“That has been my grandmother’s mission ever since she started to see that you can rewire the brain to learn how to read,” said Joelle MacPhee.

Kay MacPhee partnered with co-founder Jim Barber to found Ooka Island and develop a game that could help children learn to read.

Landing $2 million from angel investors in Toronto since 2010, they developed the program that has 7,000 discrete learning objectives and is working on adaptive learning technology.

Ooka Island is now used by more than 10,000 subscribers and has been picked up by Education Departments across the country, including First Nations school systems in Atlantic Canada.

The company is now looking for about $1.5 million to $2 million in funding to begin marketing and to advance, test and measure the adaptive learning function.

Joelle MacPhee was willing to give up 20 per cent of the company on Dragons’ Den for

$1.5 million last spring. She received an offer of 50 per cent, countered with 35 per cent and left without the money.

But she continued to seek the right funding partner. She has spent four months at the Canadian Technology Accelerator in New York City, which is run by the Canadian Consulate.

Wowed by the experience, she spent much of the time developing relationships with other companies in the educational technology space.

“What New York opened up for me is just how many digital media companies want to break into education.”