Randall Reina of McGraw-Hill Education/Dan Schlatter photo

Publishing giant The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. has been quietly building a digital center in Bothell, hoping to tap the Seattle area’s technology talent to develop online education programs for elementary and high school-age students.

McGraw-Hill isn’t entirely new to the area. It acquired the Bothell office back in 2000 when it purchased Tribune Education, a maker of education materials. But this June, New York-based McGraw-Hill renamed the Bothell operation its Center for Digital Innovation, with the goal of building new web-based learning products for K-12 schools.

The center has been steadily growing and today employs 55. Its staff includes people with experience at local technology companies, including Microsoft.

“It’s one of the reasons we like the area here,” said Randall Reina, McGraw-Hill Education senior vice president of digital product development, who heads the Bothell center. “People not only have skills in digital development but there’s a good sense of entrepreneurship and risk-taking, and that’s the kind of environment we try to create here.”

Reina wouldn’t detail the center’s hiring plans for the coming months, but said, “We expect to bring on additional staff with a variety of different skills and backgrounds in the fields of instructional design, technology and other areas.”

The center is working on three new education products: Planet Turtle, a virtual world to help kindergarten through third grade students practice math skills; Cinch Mathematics, which uses “interactive whiteboards” to teach math to kindergartners through sixth graders; and Cinch Project, for sixth graders through seniors working on group projects.

Reina said the programs are being tested in pilot programs across the country, including at Minnetonka Public Schools in Minnesota, but didn’t specify when they would be officially launched.

McGraw-Hill isn’t alone in the online education market. Locally, Seattle-based Headsprout, which is backed by educational testing giant Kaplan and others, makes literacy and reading comprehension products for children. And Apex Learning of Seattle, which was originally funded by Paul Allen's Vulcan, develops online courses for high school students.

McGraw-Hill has a relationship with Amazon.com, selling books through the Seattle-based e-commerce giant (including some higher education titles in digital form for Amazon’s Kindle electronic reader). But Reina said the Bothell center and its online education products are not connected to Amazon.

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