Agora Mobile, a New Brunswick software company, is offering all New Brunswick teachers a free premium lifetime membership to its platform Vizwik.

Vizwik is an online platform that allows anyone to create an app and sell it to others on the platform. Simon Gauvin, CEO and founder of Agora Mobile, said that Vizwik makes programming and coding easier because there are visual pointers on the platform to help users code and program their apps.

Gauvin said that coding is just as essential to students today as reading, writing and arithmetic. He encourages teachers to integrate programming and coding—with the help of Vizwik—into their lessons. This can help the students not only further their understanding in a traditional subject, such as science or geography, but also discover the possibilities and capabilities of coding.

“The digital economy is worldwide, there’s no reason why New Brunswick can’t participate in that,” Gauvin said. “The kids in high school have no visibility in that right now. Everything they have has nothing to do with the digital economy, and yet everyone’s a participant as a consumer, and nobody’s participating as a producer. We need to solve this problem.”

More than 500 teachers already signed up on Vizwik, and have used the platform to interact with more than 4,000 students. The project is in keeping with the goals of Brilliant Labs, the initiative in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to increase programming education.

The best part about Vizwik is that the teachers don’t need to know how to code to use it in their classrooms and teach their students to code. Gauvin recommends integrating Vizwik slowly into the classroom: first, use Vizwik with more traditional media, such as photos or text; next, create a button, which can allow one to navigate outside the traditional media and go from one medium to another; finally, start computing: create things that you want to use that aren’t part of traditional media.

Gauvin said that by the final step, the students are usually ahead of the teacher. Growing up in a technological age, they already know many of these things, but are expanding on them with the help of Vizwik.

In case Vizwik is proving difficult for the teacher, there are several tutorial videos on the website that show users how to use Vizwik.

MaRS Discovery District, a Toronto not-for-profit innovation hub, included Agora Mobile as part of the Impact8, which helps eight high-potential social ventures to attain financing. Gauvin said that he sees potential for Vizwik to expand to other impoverished areas to teach kids to code.

In September, Ontario will introduce Vizwik in some of its schools. The province of New Brunswick already recommends Vizwik as a tool for computational learning.

“The magic of Vizwik is that we don’t represent code in a cryptic way,” Gauvin said. “We represent the instructions in a very visual and tactical way so that you can catch them and drag them and connect them like Lego, and that makes learning to code in our platform significantly easier—and it also makes it’s more accessible to more of the population.”

Gauvin said that the true monetary market lies in bigger expansions of the platform, in places like Ontario or the US. Vizwik already has users in over 20 countries, such as Chile and Australia.

Gauvin added that after creating apps on Vizwik, users can sell them on this online store without needing people to download them, making apps adaptable to any device. Once the app store gets up and running outside of New Brunswick, Agora Mobile can start monetizing Vizwik by taking a cut from apps bought on the platform.

“We’re trying to bringing coding to everyone in the world,” Gauvin said, “and that provides entrepreneurship abilities into the digital world for everyone in the world.”