As it launches the pilot of its first product, Halifax-based Squiggle Park has been accepted into the Fierce Founders Accelerator, a new program in Kitchener-Waterloo for female tech entrepreneurs.

The Halifax educational technology company, formerly known as EyeRead, is one of nine startups from across the country to be accepted into the new program at Communitech, the ever-expanding innovation hub in downtown Kitchener, Ont.

During the six-month program, Squiggle Park will launch its online reading games for pre-kindergarten to Grade 1 teachers to use in the classroom.

The company had hoped to sign up 500 teachers for the pilot and it has ended up with 580, with strong take-up in such American states as New York, Texas, and California. It plans a full launch of the product in the new years at a price of $249 per class per year.

Once a range of students uses the product, Squiggle Park hopes to build up a library of data on how children learn to read and use it to help educators.

“We have heard from teachers that the data from Squiggle Park can be an extremely strong support for them in the delivery of differentiated learning in classrooms where one-on-one time is at a premium,” Squiggle Park CEO Leah Skerry said in an interview from Kitchener this week.

A spinoff from the Halifax web-development company Norex, Squiggle Park was started by Skerry and her co-founder Julia Rivard Dexter with the goal of developing an eye-tracking solution to help children to read. Using an infrared light on a computer or tablet, the system would track the child’s eye as he or she reads so the system can identify what part of the text gives the child problems.

Skerry said the company still has the long-term goal of bringing out an eye-tracking system. But the team realized the challenges in that goal, many of them involving the hardware available to students. So to get a product on the market quickly, it chose to proceed with the simpler product to bring in revenues and build up data.

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Squiggle Park, which has raised about $500,000 in financing from investors including East Valley Ventures of Saint John, will have a product in the market by the time it completes the Fierce Founder Accelerator in February.

The new accelerator has grown out of a series of summer bootcamps for female startup founders hosted by Communitech the last three years. The whole Fierce Founder initiative has strengthened the ties between Atlantic Canada and Communitech as the East Coast participants have shone in the programs. There has been an Atlantic Canadian team in each of the three bootcamps, and Sarah Murphy, CEO of St. John’s-based Sentinel Alert, won the $35,000 first prize at the 2015 bootcamp. Now Squiggle Park is continuing the relationship by going through the accelerator.

“The Fierce Founder Accelerator is, from what we know, the first of its kind in Canada,” said Communitech spokeswoman Samantha Clark. “The premise is to diversify startups in Waterloo Region, then in Ontario, and now across Canada because we have accepted teams from across the country.”