Last week, she used a government-sponsored tech conference in Vancouver to announce that computer coding would be a standard part of the curriculum taught in the province's schools. Premier Christy Clark has taken a special interest in the tech sector lately with several high-profile funding and policy announcements. Over all, 20,400 Canadians are directly employed by the games industry, with 5,500 jobs in British Columbia. On the whole, the Canadian games industry is worth more than $3-billion and has grown by 31 per cent over the past three years, according to the group. The 2015 report from the software association puts British Columbia as the second-largest province in terms of video-game production. 'The number of smaller companies has jumped in the past two years,' Julien Lavoie of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada said. Game creators can now self-publish on digital storefronts, making their product available to anyone with an Internet connection. Independent and small-scale game creation is becoming more feasible with the advent of non-traditional funding, and digital distribution. 'We were overwhelmed with the support we got.' 'We didn't want to give away a huge amount of equity to an investor unless we needed to,' Mr.