Halifax-based edtech company Squiggle Park is starting August off the right way, pondering how to build on its app’s 5000-percent-plus jump in downloads in iTunes last month.

The company, whose online games help children to learn to read, received the news last week that Apple had selected it late in July to appear in the section titled “New Apps We Love” for iTunes Canada - which is the top section displayed in the store. As a result for the month of July, there were 965 downloads of the Squiggle Park app – up 5,576 percent from the previous month. Impressions were even stronger, jumping 2.7 million percent to 3.2 million. Almost all the increase came in the last five days of the month, after it appeared in the highlighted section.

Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer Julia Rivard Dexter said in an interview today that she was taken aback Wednesday when she received the latest analytics.

“When I got those metrics, it took a moment to figure out whether these are real,” she said. “I studied them and realized they were real. Then I spent the rest of the day asking what this means. How do we recreate this success?”

Squiggle Park, which recently went through the Fierce Founder Accelerator at Communitech in Kitchener, Ont., has been on a bit of a roll lately. The company’s online games are now used in 3,000 schools, concentrated in North America but including such markets as Oman and China. And it recently received approval from the Build in Canada Innovation Program, which will provide $500,000 to an educational body that adopts the technology.

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In May, Squiggle Park struck a partnership with the Indigo Love of Reading Foundation, which places the company’s edtech product in some of the most disadvantaged schools in Canada. Following that, Indigo/Chapters CEO Heather Reisman invested in Squiggle Park, joining such backers as members of East Valley Ventures. “Having the largest powerhouse on the scene in Canada, in terms of literacy, is really something and we’re very proud of that,” said Rivard Dexter.

Rivard said being highlighted in iTunes has created a new opportunity for the company, and now she and her teammates are trying to figure out how to build on it.

The entry into the “New Apps We Love” section only covered iTunes Canada, so there is always the possibility of getting similar play in the U.S., which could create even more of a bang. What’s more, the downloads come from parents. Most of the company’s traction to date has been with educators. Nnow the company has more inroads in the parent market – a far larger group of potential customers, but one that requires broader marketing than reaching out to schools and teachers.

The Squiggle Park app is now free, and the company plans to introduce a paid app in the autumn. The recent wave of downloads gives the company a base to which it can market the paid app.

Said Rivard Dexter: “The goal now would be to really understand how this happened so we can re-create this type of success in the future and sustain it.”